How A Cocaine Trafficker Survived 10 Years As A Fugitive In Mexico

There was a rumor that my body had been found dumped at the Mexican border. So that rumor was circulating. And I'm in Mexico, I'm fugitive. I had four different names. I'm never going back. This is the end of the road. It's a whole different game with the Feds. They showed up in Mexico. They landed a helicopter on the street. And they showed me my inner pole, wanted poster. The next thing I know, they threw a bag over my head. And my trip to Cuba, these two guys came to my room to pick up a bag that I brought them. And they asked me, you want to buy some cigars? It was either 20 or 25 bucks a box. I tell this guy, Brett, my friend, I have him. He asks for one. He calls me about a week later. And he says, hey, you have any more of those? I said, you smoked them already? And he goes, no, sold them for how much? He goes 25 bucks a piece. So I'm thinking I paid 20, 625, caching. My first trip was 40 boxes. My second trip was 100 boxes. My third trip was 300. My fourth trip was 600. I knew everybody. I'm going to Michael Jordan's house with cigars. What's it like being a career criminal on the run from the feds in Mexico? Just ask Scott Anthony, a gangster from Chicago who did more dirt in one day than most criminals do in a lifetime. Scott ran a robbery crew, held up armored cars and banks, pulled jewelry store heists, and trafficked large amounts of cocaine for Colombian cartels into every neighborhood in Chicago. Scott lived on a lamb in Mexico for almost 10 years, and then went on to start a Cuban cigar smuggling operation that netted him millions of dollars and made him one of the most popular people in the Chicago underworld. He sold high-end Cuban Stogies to everyone who was anyone, including his airness, Michael Jordan. These days, Scott's a successful businessman and author still living in Mexico. He's got a series of books out about his criminal life, including his latest called Street Rays. Go to scottanthony.org.com or hit the link in the description below. His life is a movie, so go get your popcorn. It's Scott Anthony right here on the connect with Johnny Mitchell. [MUSIC PLAYING] Where I come from, I never-- I was beaten by the police more times than I can count. I'm from the streets of Chicago, the inner city in the 1970s and '80s, cops are tough dudes. I never motherfucked them. I never disrespect them. There were two guys I wanted. I was hunting them. Then I realized, if I was a cop, I'd be doing the same thing as them. You know this fucking guy what he's doing? You know-- look, I was driving a delorean at 19 years old. The fucking doors went up in the street. I would feel like this. I go, fuck, man, this was the stupidest thing I ever bought. And imagine a cop. They were making like $17,000 in 1983 when I bought that car. And they see you driving a $35,000 stainless steel fucking stupid car. They know what you're doing. And they've got snitches everywhere. You know, you said a little while ago, how all the Italian guys-- so they're all ratting. But there's so many people snitching to the cops, even when they don't know they're doing it. Like, they make a comment if they have a family member or a friend of mine. I was wanted by the Secret Service because I was involved with counterfeit money, too. And one of my friends, a thug from the streets-- he was dating a girl. Her sister was married to a Secret Service agent, so they co-existed a lot. And he later told me, oh, Scott, he talked about this and this. And in my mind, I'm going, what the fuck are you fucking two talking about me? I don't know if he was bragging to the guy. How did my name fucking come up? He did he run him and then said to him, hey, I ran you. And I know your friends with Scott because I was wanted at that time. If you want to be a good criminal, you basically-- you got to be on your own. You can't tell anybody. You can't flash. It's a hard career now. In the '70s and '80s, it was simpler, right? Because you could slip through the cracks with technology now. They can bug your cameras, any TV, any electronic. One of the Mexican cartel guys was about to get out. X amount of years ago. And I was visiting him before he got out. And he was talking strategy. First of all, he told me, I need a million dollars a month to exist, security, detail, bribes, everything. And all of his workers, they had all the tags cut out of all of their clothes. I don't know what's in those tags. But these guys at this level, they got CIA connections and Israeli. And so something in the clothing and the tags, and also all of his entourage had like 1980s and 90s cars, mostly Jeep Cherokees, 'cause the newer ones have electronic systems in them. So it's a fucking game. People are going back and forth. You've got the good guys and the bad guys. And it's a fine line because a lot of cops are bad asses. A lot of them were military. We were all young men at one time. You know, how you were just talking to your buddy a little while ago, busting his chops a little bit. All guys do that, all guys play sports. All guys, you know, guys walk around, they're guys. And so cops are, let's take a guy who went into the Marines at 18 years old, he comes a Marine, he gets trained, he gets his hard ass attitude. Then he gets out and he joins law enforcement and then they train him, they train them. I don't know if you ever felt this way. You have just one conviction, you've got several. When you have convictions, you're a piece of shit. Go through immigration, customs, get pulled over and they run you. You are not seen as a normal citizen. Once you have that chink and you're armor with a felony, you're like a second-class citizen. Cops look at you and you're like, fuck, criminal. A lot of them haven't added to, you know, criminal. And fine line, so it's a cat and mouse game and there's a lot more mice than there are cats and they're scattering. People are out there doing whatever they can and at the end of the day, it's kind of a game. Catch me if you can, kind of a thing. I was really good at it. I developed my first period of life as a young juvenile delinquent. I was in a street gang by nine years old. I was the leader of that branch. It was a big street gang. Simon City Royals in Chicago. - I just found out about those guys. - Oh, you did. - Yeah, they got a big presence in Mississippi. - Oh, they're really big in Mississippi. And I just wrote my first story, my first book and it's a lot of it is about the street gang. I never talked about it, Johnny. When I moved on from that, I never talked about it. I was embarrassed. It's a scumbag world. That is not the kind of crime I had dreamt of. I wanted to be a street soldier but a force to be reckoned with. Did you ever see the movie The Warriors? - Of course. - Our life was very, very similar to that. Only remove those guys were all older, really. And when I look at the pictures now, there's a Facebook page, Chicago Greaser Gangs. I think it's Chicago Greaser Gangs. And I look at the pictures and I go, we're just kids. You look at these pictures and I go, I would beat every one of their asses senseless. But we were wild, feral, savage. My father left when I was four. I hit the streets running. I did my first burglary at seven. I got arrested for the first time at nine. Got a tattoo at nine. And was a gang leader by 14. You're talking some heavy, you're talking heavy stuff. I mean, by the time I was 14, I was already involved with murders and burglaries and arm robberies. And I mean, there was a guy killed right next to me when I was 13 years old. And you see a lot of bad stuff. And I started seeing the older guys shooting dope junkies. Oh, that turned me off. That was, I could just, I thank God. I really do often that I could see stuff and I could tell maybe it was the moral code and grain to me at a really good mother. She was lost. She didn't know what to do. The state took me and my sister away from her. So at 10, I was in an orphanage. My sister was in some youth home, downstate Illinois. And they threw me out of every school I went to. I got thrown out of the orphanage. And so I was like a year in limbo before I went to another bad kid school. I was in all the reform schools that Chicago had to offer, at least in my area. They're not sending us three hours away. But it was a rough life. But it's an education you learn. And what you basically learn is how to survive. There's, I've ever heard the story about the Spartans, how the Spartan kids, They're taken away from their mothers and they're starved, they're trained, they're actually abused to the point that they go out, they start stealing food to eat. And they get beaten if they get caught stealing the food, but they're not beaten for stealing. They're beaten for getting caught. So you did time, you know what it's like in prison. Every guy in prison has a sneaky way to survive, to get a little extra food, to get a little of this, a little of that, whatever it is you want. A cell phone, drugs, something to drink to alter your mood, they figure it out in prison. And it's what we started figuring out early. And so I was locked up early. I was in all the juvenile correctional places and then locked up in my first felony arrest, I was 17 years old, my birthday. And we were robbing a prostitute and because we had done that over the summer that was exhilarating, now I want to make something clear. I'm smiling and I'm getting a little animated. I'm not proud of what I did. I'm embarrassed. There's a lot of shame, but it's exhilarating the adrenaline while you're doing it. When you're selling drugs, when you're making money, when you're driving nice cars, when you're having fun, it's exciting. Not so exciting when the hammer comes down. How are you robbing prostitutes? Well, in a city like Chicago, it's very common. They had streetwalkers. So they're out on the street. I got to, it's a great story. Man, my buddy Mack, we were, we were two guys that were from the streets. We were rough. We were growing up. I was kind, I was getting out of the gangs, but I was street raised and tough and I was lifting weights. I was boxing. I was competing and wrestling. I was kind of a force to be reckoned with. I could fight and I didn't have any fear because of what I'd been through. So we would go down to this area called Uptown in Chicago, which was a rough neighborhood. It was a mixture of hillbillies, American Indians, hillbillies from the Appalachian. So we called it, or the city called it the Appalachian invasion. So you had a lot of hillbillies, a lot of American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, all mixed in in this melting pot of crap, abandoned buildings, similar to Fort Apache, the Bronx, a rough, rough area. And so we would drive there. I had a 1972 cutlass. It was red with the white stripes. Cost me 700 bucks. And Mack and I would drive up and down the street and we'd see a hooker on the corner. Two clean cut white guys, basically you and I. People look at us and say, they're not bad. It's okay, they're probably even stupid. And the first time we did it, and the most exciting time, we got this woman in the car, and she got in the back seat with Bill. It was a two door, it was a two door car, and the seat in front went over. So she got in the back with him. She was basically trapped. I had a 25 automatic, or he had it. One of us had the 25 automatic. And she told us where to go. Drive here, drive here. And in Chicago, we have these buildings that have half, like it's half underground parking garage. And we pulled in there. She told us go all the way to the back. The buildings half abandoned, just a shit hole neighbor. The whole place was a dive. And we went on there, went all the way to the back. She told me pulling that spot. Well, I knew what was going to happen. So I backed in. So I did a three point turn. I backed in. I'm sitting in the front seat. And he grabs her by the neck and puts the gun. And he starts searching her. It was cut shing for two young guys. In 1980, 1980. And he's like, I got it, I got it, I got it. And we open the door and she gets out. And we start driving. And her pimp comes out of nowhere. She's screaming like a siren. And he comes running out of nowhere. And the door is open. And he's trying to get in. And he jumps on. And I just said, fucking hold on. I punched it. And we went out of that ramp. And we were airborne. And I was turning it at the same time. We landed on the street. And this guy just flew into the car right in front of us. And we rushed off. And he's counting. It was 1,200 bucks. 1,200 bucks. It's quite a score in 1980. My mother made $2.30 an hour working. She worked at a newsstand selling newspapers. This was big cash for two poor guys from the hood. And so what do you think we thought after that? This is easy money because-- It's going on hunkers. Yeah, so we did that that entire summer until my car was so known, there was an enabre hood with hookers that we could go into. So we said, let's take it easy. And so we took it easy for a short period of time. School started again. I was actually-- my mother moved to a suburb when I was-- about 13 years old. I didn't fit in for a long time. It was very, very difficult. Low self esteem. I walked with a-- with a pimp. My entire vocabulary was slang. Everything was slang. It was pretty miserable. And living in the suburb, let me see different things. I could see a different world. So I knew it existed. And when I finally decided that I was going to educate myself and I was going to become somebody, I got on the honor roll at my high school. And it was a very, very good high school. I haven't seen township high school suburb outside of Chicago to the north. And so I tried to go straight. I had these periods where I would just work, work out, wrestle my own business, but the streets kept calling. And people call me up, hey, Scott, I got this thing. You want to get involved. Hey, these people around vacation, the house is alone. And it's like two devils here, one angel over here, and they're constantly fighting. And this one's going, don't do it, Scott. You're doing well now. Don't fuck up. And they're going, don't listen to that fucking pussy. Come with us. And so I was being torn. My 17th birthday, we went down to a very popular Aryan Chicago russ street. It was probably, I think it was a Sunday night. And we went out. It was January 1st, because I'm born on January 1st. It could have been January 2nd. It might have been January 2nd Sunday night. My friend and I went out, because young kids can't sit still. So we let's go down to the area. We're just always looking for trouble. And trouble found us. We didn't have to look very hard, either whether it was a fight or a robbery or stealing some car tire or something. We always got into something. We were driving home. We were going through that uptown neighborhood. And we got to a neighborhood that was familiar to us, like our territory, kind of not far from his house. And on the way to mine, we were driving his car. And he saw hook around the corner. It was winter, January 1st, January 2nd. And he's like, hey, you want to do something? I said, no, Mac, no, no, no, take me home. I want to go home. I got school tomorrow. He's like, come on, last one. And no, no, no, I don't want to. And I'm an adult now in Chicago. It's 17, you're an adult. So you're, it's a felony. No, no, I don't want to do it. And he pulled over right on. She's on my side of the car and he starts talking to her. I put my seat back so they could talk. And she's like, you know, you both want something? What, I go, no, no, I don't want anything. And he's like, come on, man. I said, no, I really, I got out of the car. That's how I didn't want anything to do with it. I got out of the car and they drove away. And I'm out there freezing on the street corner. And then he came back around and she's still with him. And he goes, hey, Mac, come here, come here. He said, this one's cool. I don't know what the fuck are you talking about. He goes, she gave me a plan. He said, I was robbing her. She didn't have any money. And she said, hey, why don't you guys rob my johns, my customers. And he's like, so this is what she's going to do. And she got out and walked away. And she said, you know, she's standing on that corner. We're sitting in an alley, half a block away, watching her. And he goes, we're going to follow the guys. When she lights up a cigarette, that means she's done. And he's got a lot of money. And we're hiding in between cars and gangwise. And I'm telling, let's get out of here anyway. She goes to the cops, tells the cops. And they come where we are and gave us the beating of our life. We got a beating and like out of a movie, we had a good hiding spot inside under the dashboard for the gun. But you know, they're beating us and and and we don't got anything. It's not us. You know, we don't know what you're talking about. And then one of the cops comes out with the gun and he's smile and look what I got here. Get us to the police station and he tell, I told him I was 16. I had always given phony names, phony birthdays, my entire life. Just mix it all up with anything juvenile and stupid. You're a kid. You don't know any different. And he keeps looking at me. He goes, you sure you're 16? I go, yeah, I'm 16. And he goes, I'll tell you what, if I find out you're not, you're going to get the fucking beating of your life. I'm like, yeah, I'm 16. They call my mom, I remember it because, you know, they're older than us. They're a little sharper and he goes, yeah, your son just got arrested for robbing some lady on the bus stop. Oh, I heard that. I'm like, my poor mom, having the, I didn't rob a lady on a bus stop. This was a lady of the night. And anyway, the juvenile officer came in because at that time, they had to call them. They rotated to different police stations. The lady walked in. She said, that's Scott. Today's the 17th birthday, turned around and walked out. He just looked at me and smiled, broke my ribs, beat me up. We went to the county jail, went through all that stuff, got out, I'm bond, and I wanted to hunt him down. And I mean, because they went above and beyond their call of duty, they really beat us. They really put a boot to us. And I remember asking a cop friend to help me out. I said, I want to find both of these guys. I was older. I was now like, whatever age, 28 probably, when I was still looking for them. And he said to me, he said, I'll do your favor, Scott. I know who they are. I know where they are. And he said to me, he goes, they're both dicks. He said, I, I agree with you. He said, we got a cop bar where we all hang out. And they'll fight you, you know, they're their men. He goes, I'll go there with you. And I'll have your back. He said, but I got to ask you one thing. Did you deserve it? And I kind of got pissed in the moment, looked at him, then I go, I, you know what, forget about it. I deserved it. And I accepted it. I deserved it. And I probably would have done the same if I was a cop. It's cops and robbers. That is their job. If everything I've ever done in my life, Johnny, crime, hard work, school, wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, anything I've ever done, I'm all in. And I do the best job I can do. If I was a cop or a prosecutor, that would be my mission too. Now, you've been involved with federal prosecutors. Yeah, you're not allowed to beat somebody like the whole point of the law is there above the criminal. So if, if they could beat you up and break your ribs and not give you a criminal case, cool. But the fact that they're taking away your freedom and your handcuff and you're at the mercy of the state, they're not allowed to beat you up. You, you, you've got to not a civilized society. You do have a very, very good debate there, but do you want to be equitable or do you want to be the United States? Let's ask your viewers who grew up in Chicago or New York in the 60s or 70s, what it was like with the cops. I was handcuffed to a wall one time. Both arms. We had they had these benches and they had hooks, metal hooks in the wall. I was handcuffed both sides. And they would use the old yellow pages. Do you remember yellow pages? They would use those. Now there were several techniques. Again, I'm not a beginner. This is years and years in the making of, and again, I kind of deserved it. They would put the yellow pages on your chest. So someone would hold it and then they'd punch you and they do target practice. And it's just impact. It's the whole thing. So you don't feel this one shot here, but it's everywhere and it's brutal. No bruises. They would hit us, beat us with the yellow pages. And this was the beautiful one. So your handcuffed here and they would put the yellow pages on your head and then they would hit it with the Billy Club. It was torture. It was brutal. But again, I never cried. I remember my buddy Wacker. He was next to me and they were beating him, beating him. And they would pull his head up. I remember they pulled his head up and it was sweaty and beating and they pulled him up. And you got something to say and he just went like this. After a beating, these were my mentors. These were my teachers. And I had no father at home. My father abandoned us when I was four. I had no older brother. My grandfather unfortunately died when I was seven. My whole life would have been different. My grandfather didn't die. He was an old school Italian. Might have been a mobster. But my life, I went to the streets and the guys who who I looked up to were thugs. They were criminals. And you got to understand something. There was a time when those guys were only 13 or 14. So I was nine. And I'm looking at that 14-year-old Stephen Clark, man, he's so cool. And we got cities have a lot like ethnicities, have a lot of nicknames. Everybody had nicknames. We all knew each other. We all knew each other's names. And I'll tell you something really cool, Johnny. My friend, John Romano, who's a well-known writer in the bodybuilding world, he heard me one time in my office on the phone and stuff. He's like, God, it's so cool, man. You know all these guys since you were a kid. That's what it's like growing up in a neighborhood. I probably know. I mean, I have my personal Facebook. I have like 600 friends. But like people that I still know, it's hundreds or thousands. And you know them. You knew their parents and where they lived and all of this different stuff. So even though they're dying, sadly, dying one at a time because they're aging out and none of them took care of themselves. So many people I'm still in contact with. And since I've gone on social media, I wasn't on social media a few years ago. I wrote my first book about the Cuban cigar smuggling. And people started hitting me up. And when I wrote my second book, Street Raced, man, I'm getting people there. It's so funny to watch because I'm seeing people talk and they're like, is that Scotty on the cover? I remember him. And it just feels kind of cool that we're all connected through neighborhoods. It was Chicago was another planet in the 1970s and 80s, another planet. There were no Yuppies. Yuppies didn't exist yet. College, what we'll talk about something, white privilege. People talk about white privilege. What a crock of shit that is. But I lived on the other side of the no privilege. So I thought white privilege existed too. And now that I'm older and wiser, white privilege is having two parents at home that are not criminals that work, make sacrifice, make their kids do the right kids. Their kids brush their teeth and comb their hair and wash their hands and face and go to sleep and do their homework and go to school. And they grow up educated. I didn't have that. When my mother moved to the suburbs, what a culture shock. I hated it. It was it was almost impossible to to to acclimate to that. And, but I met the worst people I could possibly meet in the suburbs. I met the bad boys of the suburbs. And they helped me kind of slowly fit in till eventually. If you would have seen me, my junior and senior year of high school, and you didn't know me, you would say, that's some suburban Yuppie. Got a good education. I made the honor roll. And what that insecurity and that non white privilege. I understand what people say. They say they have this. They have that. But they earn it and they work for it because it's generations of schooling and work ethic and squeaking out a life. I would look at these people. And to me, they were all rich. I thought they're they're all rich. They all have everything. They're all smart. It was hard work. That's what it was. And I made a promise to myself. I was going to educate myself. And I had a scholarship. I had an offer for wrestling to Northwestern University. Oh, fuck. I was so scared. I couldn't fit in with these people. Even though on the outside, I look like them on the inside, I would steal street and and thug partial anyway. So how did you step up from, you know, being a street gang, petty crime bullshit to the next level? Yeah. Because it's like, you know, you know what they say about marijuana being the gateway drug 500%. John Romano has it saying, if you do drugs, you do drugs. Like there's no limit. You know, what's the difference with a guy shooting up dope or snorting it? The the form. It gets into your body. I know there's a stigma about it and it freaks me out. But at the end of the day, you're using drugs. So we'd kind of, hey, you want to do a pill. It makes you feel good. We got this acid. We've got this dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. It grows. Crime is exactly the same thing. So my first crime was a burglary. My next crimes were probably all petty theft, shoplifting. Then I did another burglary. Then I did 20 burglaries and I did a hundred burglaries. Then then we're doing, we're doing shootings and stabings and murders. I saw guy murdered right next to me when I was 13 years old with my sword cane. We carried canes. We wore top hats. We wore our gang colors back then in Chicago. They were sweaters. You had these knitted sweaters with your colors. Mine were royal blue and black and we had these double emblems that were absolutely beautiful. And we were miniature thug scumbags and you it keeps growing. And then the older guys kind of get recruited by the next level of crime. So when I was, I'm going to guess 17. I was recruited by some mob people and I started renting apartments for gambling operations. So they would send me in to rent the apartments. Then I would go and get the electric bill and the phones and we'd get three or four phone lines set up and they'd have the ladies in there with flash paper to taking bets. And so I started doing that. And then because, look, I'm not the toughest guy in the world and I'm not the biggest, but I'm from the street and it's just a different world. And they'd send us out to collect some bills. So, you know, go, go, go get the money from this guy. And we had no skin in the game. No, I didn't have a conscience until I was about 25 maybe is when it started forming, beat somebody up, you could care less. It didn't matter. Hey, and that was it. And I learned early stay away from the mob. They only care about money. Their loyalty is to themselves. There's a hierarchy and they all kiss ass going up, but they don't love their boss. They all, they're all doing shit as much as they can get away with, but they stay within the lines. They're all kind of jealous. And as in the in the mob, in criminal crews, in the military, in the police, there's there's a certain amount of people that have an IQ that can get them somewhere. The rest are frontline soldiers. And even though they want to get higher, it's not that easy. You've got to have the abilities to get higher. And I have those abilities. So I knew that stay away from the mob guys because they were bullies too. So they took the lion share in the gangs. Like, I would go and do a burglary. I would literally be searched. And a few times trip search, coming out of a burger. No, no, no, you got more. And they, you know, we'd go back to whoever's house we were stationed at that day. Fucking take your clothes off. Let's see what you got hidden because we did hide stuff because we know when we came out, they're taking it all from us. And it wasn't riches, but, you know, you steal some jewelry and they pawn stuff for pennies on the dollar. And then we would do drugs. When I was 13 years old, I was recruited by one of the the roughest street guys in my area, at least his name called him Wacker. He had already been in prison. He was, he was your height. He was six foot four. And there was 100% go. There was no stop and go with him. It was just go, go, go. He, he came and recruited me and, and my other partner, kid from our street corner. He was from a different neighborhood and a different gang. But he, you know, we were the same, same people, same, same alliance basically. And he can come, come with me. Come on. You guys to hang out. We, we had, we went and stole the bicycle. We stole from apartment building shed. So we stole the bicycle. He went and bought what was back then called tick. Do you know what that was? Angel dust tick. T something. GCP. Basically PCP. He went, bought that and he gave it to us. And we all split it up. And that's where the drugs go from one. I'd never done anything like that in my life. But this big cool guy says it's cool. What do I know? 13 years old, no, no supervision, no role models, except for him. He was a real role model to me. And then he said, look, this is what we're doing tomorrow. Bob, Bob Takaki was one of the high ranking guys in the T.J. O gang in Chicago, which was a fierce organized gang. Bob, he had stabbed Bob a year before that and went gone to prison. And Bob had called a meeting. I want to meet you tomorrow. So he came to get us and explained to us, you, you're going to wait in the alley where we're meeting. And back then, in my book, I write about it as a ski mask because I didn't want to explain it, but I explain it now. Back in the 1970s, you use lady stockings as a mask. The problem with those is they could rip, tear, and run. And you know, you know, I have your face is showing, but we used them often. So I had one of his mother's stockings on my head. And he said, he had this little, this little pump shotgun, little 12 gauge thought off. And they were very common in those days. And it had an eye hook in the butt. So you could use a strap over your shoulder and hide it underneath your long coat. We often wore long coats in the cold weather to hide our weapons. And he said, so this is the deal. Bob is going to come walking up and we're going to meet here. And I'm going to give him my hand if he starts throwing hands and we start fighting. You guys come out. You waste him. Okay, I'm all in. We went to sleep in the backyard of his house out on the lawn. It was a hot Chicago summer night, woke up. And the other guy kid, he was gone. He took off because he couldn't handle the heat. It was we're going to kill somebody. And Waker says, okay, it's just you, man. And he said, and when you do it, you're going to run back down the alley as you're going to come into my house. My mom's going to hide you up in the attic for three weeks until the heat dies down. I didn't even know what I was doing, Johnny. I had no clue. I was following orders. That's what I was doing. So there I was in that alley. We wore wife-beaters. That was like, you know, our attire. I was wearing a wife-beater and we wore baggy pants like Dickies, blue baggy pants. That was our uniform converse with the tone laces for our gang. And I was, I don't know what could I have weighed 90 pounds. And I was I was sitting in that alley. I had that shotgun here. I had this thing here and I was just watching and waiting. Bob came up, put his hand out. They shook hands. And Bob said, it was my fault. And that said, I don't think Bob ever knew what was coming. And I was there to do a job. And there was no way I was going to let down my street hero. Someone up there was watching over me. His hand was on my shoulder and it didn't happen. And me and Wacker became you know, big brother and little brother from that day on until the day he died a few years ago. And he he spent a total of 36 years in prison in his life. He was in and out and in and out all the time. And whenever he was out, I was there the moment he got out. And what ended up happening is like all these older guys I looked up to, I started figuring out each period of time you grow as a person, I would go, wait, I don't want to be like that. And I'd go, I don't want to do drugs. They're not good for you. Because when I was young, I thought it's cool. Right. You're getting high, man. Cool. The cool guys getting high. And then I go, now I want to be a warrior. I want to be a soldier. I don't want to be a wrinkled up drug addict. And and I don't want to do these bad things. I don't want to snatch old ladies purses and hurt people for nothing. And then when I started, you know, gang bang and get serious and deep, real deep. And one day I said, wait a minute, I'm going to go over there and bust Johnny's head with a bat because his his sweater is green and mine is blue. We could be friends under other circumstances because we were all the same brothers in in the struggle of life. And I said, man, I don't want this. I remember Whackard called me from prison, called me collect. And I said, that's it. Man, I'm done gang bang. And he goes, okay, I get you, man. That's good. And then he sent me a letter. He goes, but if you, if you get busted and you coming in here, you say your Satan's disciple. Don't say you're a royal because the Satan's disciples got a lot of power in here. And you're with me under my umbrella and you'll be fine. And it was a hard move from the gangs people. They don't want you to move up. They don't want you to get better at the fight with people had to argue with people and the reputation and the people you heard in the past. They don't forget. So I had a lot of fights getting out and then I got educated. So I went, I went to, I was going to school and I wasn't missing. I was still in bad kid school. And then I met this most amazing woman. So she was a faculty member of the school. I was 14 and she was 26, 27, something like that. Absolutely stunning. And that was most of the reason I wanted. Gang bangers don't get the beautiful women. Celebrities and athletes do in business, man. Drug dealers. Drug dealers get plenty of it, but not the quality ones. And that's what I learned to when I was a, I was a big drug dealer. So, so fast forward. I started, I started developing into human. I started, I was getting smarter. I was looking at things. She was the first insight I had into like the real world because all of her friends were young professionals. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen. I was looking and going, wow. And they were cool. They weren't arrogant. They definitely weren't hard asses and bullies like the gang guys were. They were just cool guys. They all worked out and I was like, oh, that's another level I'd never seen. I would have never seen it if I stayed in my neighborhood, but I got to go to her neighborhood. And then she forced me to go back into mainstream school. She said, Scott, you can't keep going to these bad boy schools because it was all gangs. She would tease me all the time. Oh, tough guy. Gonna go out and get gang flake baggy pants so you can kick. Yeah. Real tough guy. And she did a lot of work and got me back into mainstream school in the suburb. I acclimated, educated myself. And I used to like to think I was clean for a long time, but I wasn't because I was doing burglaries and money. Now I was interested in money. 16 years old, lifting weights. I want money. 17 years old. I want more money. I'm liking higher quality girls and six months before I graduated from high school, I robbed my first drug dealer. And he was a big drug dealer. This guy, we got a full kilo of coke. 1981, Fokilo Coke, 80, 100 grand, Fokilo of heroin, a couple bricks of Turkish hash because it had the stamps on it, a complete about the size of this chair, almost the size of the bookshelf here, an old moral bowl, moral burrow case in Spanish, probably coming from Colombia and it was gold. So it was probably Colombian gold. So a full bail of weed, maybe 40 pounds and quailudes, huge bag quailudes, MDA, all this money, a couple of guns, I remember, you know, we did a home invasion, we tied them up and we took all this stuff and we ran out into the street. I didn't, it was seen from a movie, three kids, it was me, I was 17, it was 17 and a half, it was six months after that prostitute thing, it was my friend Brett, he was 15 and then it was Colin, he was 13, they convinced me to do it, I didn't want to do it, they were hunting me down because I had met this guy because we had two girls one night and my buddy Max like, hey, let's go get some quailudes for the girls, the girls are like, yeah, and we're like, oh, yeah. And you know, when your young girls are everything, it just is the way that it is. So I met this guy by default, he saw our faces, did the home invasion and then he was connected. So they tracked down the guy, Mack, because he worked at a very well-known restaurant. We were just kids. I worked at a grocery store, stocking shelves. Even though I had a lot of street experience, anybody who knows the streets knows, you just really kids. Bad kids, but you know, bang, bang, you can slap a kid around really, a grown man can. And so they went and picked him up. They snatched him from the restaurant, he had a meeting and a sit down, but he's lucky because that mafia woman who we were renting the apartments for really cared about him. So she made a call. She said, hey, you guys better be careful with this guy because he's not alone. He better come back from this meeting. So he came back from the meeting and he called me up and he said, Scott, they know you go to Evanston. They don't know who you are. I didn't give you up. This is serious, man. You got to give it back. And I said, there's not a chance I'm giving it back. To me, Johnny, I'm not being a hard ass, I'm not playing hard. This was all or nothing for me. I had nothing. We lived in a government subsidized apartment, I had a shitty $700 car. My mother made $230 cents an hour working at a new stand. And I had never seen anything like this in my life and all I had been through and what I had been taught and where I came from. I said, they got to come and get it. And you know, I said, you better not tell him who I am because it wouldn't have gone well for him. And I said, you better not tell him. And I had been consulting Wacker at prison because he was doing time. He told me, when you do this little brother, you're the lead on this. You go in the bedroom and you kill him. You take the pillow. You put it over their head over his face. You pull the trigger. He said, the pillow is going to stand on fire. You put it out and I go, no, man, I'm not doing that. I'm there for the money. He said, they're going to come for you, man. They saw you wearing the guy we hit. His name was Andy. We called him Andy Q. He got busted really big about six months later. So I quit worrying about, not about a year later, it was on the news. I don't know. He was dealing for somebody. He was obviously really big and he was telling me, when we were running around his house, he was saying, you don't know what you're doing. You're in big trouble. You're just kids. You're dead. You understand that? I would go over there and slap him around and tell him a few choice words about who ran the streets. I was bold. That was young and bold. Before we left his apartment, I grabbed inside the bell, the weed, and I threw weed everywhere. I threw weed down the front stairs. I just had a feeling that he was going to call the cops and he called the cops. One day, I was walking through. He couldn't find me. He had no way to get to me. The cops started investigating leads and he just told him it was a home invasion. He was home invaded and that was it. One day I was walking down the hallway at school and I saw him and I saw the Chicago police in the office and they were looking at the yearbooks. I had never taken one picture of my school. The entire time I was in that school because I was already a seasoned criminal. We don't like pictures. He didn't find me. I slept on the floor of our shitty apartment with a pump shotgun for about a year. My mother never asked me, "Why are you sleeping on the floor?" The reason I slept on the floor because the front door was here, the back door was over there and there was a dining room table that was oval-shaped and I slept on the other side because I thought I could just get them anyway. They come in and who is going to be expecting somebody to sleep on the floor? Nobody. They're going to go for the bedrooms. It was a very difficult year for me. You got away with it. I got away with it. What happened with the drugs? Tell us about this. You really want to know? You got $300,000 or $400,000 worth of drugs right there. You sell it outright. The first thing I did was I hit it. I went to that faculty member of my school who was no longer—we were still friends. We were friends to this day. I wrapped a kilo of coke up in tape so I taped it and that was my way of protecting it. The bail of weed, I put in my punching bag. I got a punching bag in the basement so I emptied the punching bag and I filled it with the weed, put some of the filler up on top and then closed it. The other stuff that was laying around, the pills and stuff, I washed the heroin down the sink. It was gross to me. I wouldn't deal drugs today. I wouldn't deal the drugs that they're out there selling. I might deal weed but it's bad stuff. I didn't want to hurt anybody. Coke in 1981 was the Hollywood nuance. It was okay. It was vitamin C. It was high-end. It was expensive so I hit it for a little while and I told the other two guys it's quiet time. But we started doing it. Have you ever done any? Have I ever done coke? Yeah. Yeah. So you know what happens? The euphoria turns into paranoia, turns into peaking out of windows so we started doing it and we started wasting. We're just throwing money away, wasting money and it got to a point where I said that's it. I'm fucking this up. I am fucking it up because we didn't know what we had and that's when I put a clamp on it and started selling but I had a lot of when I finally went out and reached out to some people in the suburb I was living and nobody's buying it. No one's going to buy it. So I'm forced to go back to the city but it's only like I was away in prison because it only been a little while that I really wasn't there. So I started looking up old friends and started making contacts with old people I knew and that's when I started selling it and then I actually became a dealer. So I didn't dump it because they were offering me pennies on the dollar. The few people I went to were like, oh yeah yeah man I'll give you a five bucks for that and I'm like yeah I'm not stupid and so I avoided the few people that were driving me crazy wanting to buy it wholesale pennies on the dollar really taking advantage of me. I said no because this isn't going to get me where I want to go. I knew I had a hunger that I wanted the next level of life so I started selling it and eventually I'm now the big dealer and you know what it's like being the big dealer. You are daddy disco dust and everybody had a beeper. Everybody's looking for me. I'm invited to every party I'm in everything and so I start pulling in the closest guys that I could trust and I start fronting them product and I start rebying. So now I'm rebying and selling, rebying, selling, rebying, selling. I didn't really know where I was standing. I didn't have a grasp. I'm 18 years old, 19 years old, don't really know where I am. Fast forward, I'm a pretty big dealer and I'm making runs down to Miami because I want wholesale and you know the price was probably only five grand difference in Chicago and Miami maybe 10 depending on your connections. I'm running it. That's a frequent thing. You got connects, you got Cubans down there. Yeah, yeah. They weren't a lot of Colombians in there. I had some Colombians in Chicago and I had a few Colombians. I was too young and innocent to really know what was going on but I was robbing drug dealers. I was taken. I did about 40 home and phasions on drug dealers and then in Chicago in 1984 and I guess it's in my third book. There was a big big drug deal going bad involving us and it was a cops doing a setup and my oozy was out there shooting it out with the cops on a six corner street in Chicago in the middle of broad daylight. It was a pretty big deal. That was the beginning of the end for me. So that was another day I got picked up and beaten for three days. You were in a shootout? I wasn't in. I bailed at the last minute. So Wacker, a guy by the name of Gary Callis, very famous T.J.O. one of the founders of the T.J.O. T.J.O. is short for Thorndale Jaggoffs. They were forced to be reckoned with serious criminals. us had robbed an armored car only three months before that in July. So you know, I was telling you about the movie town, but I'm sitting there watching the movie town and I'm thinking, these guys are kind of like amateurs, you know, town, they were very good. The movie was very good. And that's what we did. We took down jobs, we did crime, and I was as serious as you could get. I was so serious, that's why I'm not famous. And because anybody who is a good criminal, the best criminals, that's what they know how to do. And I got very, very good at it. I got very good at being invisible, being quiet. That was July of 1984, would have been the armored car in October 16th of 1984, was to shoot out with, I bailed it the last minute. I made up, I just made up a lion excuse because Gary was in charge of it and Gary was a thug. He was old school, 1960s criminal, like some old scop show, a balding and a strong face and everything was kill him, kill him, kill him. And they did it in the parking lot of a Carson's ribs. You can find it all over. I'll send you the articles. The Carson's ribs shoot out in Chicago, October 16th, 1984. And that, that really brought me into the, the site of the feds. And of a little bit further along, I got involved in counterfeit and I was bringing guns from Florida. So I was bringing, I was selling guns, I was selling coke, I was burning drug dealers and I was alive wire. And I was coming back from Florida on my last trip to Miami. It was January 1987, pre guidelines got pulled over in Georgia. I had bags with hidden compartments and after three, four or five, five searches, they found it. I took off running, got away, I had six kilos, but this is the funny thing. And I, I was a little uncomfortable, I'm still uncomfortable about it in my book. I don't want to make any enemies and law enforcement. They only reported three kilos or seven pounds. I didn't even know what to say. So in my book, it says seven pounds. I don't want people, you know, yeah, that'll be a shocker. Georgia cops ran off of some keys in the 80s. Yeah, you think they all did it? I know Chicago cops was a whole different game. I had Chicago cops setting up drug dealers for me. They sent me, they sent me for $100,000, 2010 in Portland, Oregon. So you think they wouldn't, you know, they took, they took 500 or so out of my house. And they only reported four or something. Okay. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been through two times. Yeah. And, and so I ran and got away. I, I was in the woods for three days. So I was, I was running through the woods. I was a survivalist and I was training. At that time, I was a kickboxer and I was training for a fight. So I was in pristine shape and I got away three days in the woods, made it back to Chicago. And I don't know if I was just stupid, I, I didn't hit me for a couple days really. How fucked I was. And I got back to Chicago and I told, I told a friend and he pointed at me and laughed. And I couldn't believe it. I was like, because criminals get together and they talk about their cases. Like, what happened to you? What lawyer are you going to use? Hey, what happened? No, they're not going to be able to get you because of this. So we're going over the case and he starts laughing at me and what it is is he knows I was gone. He owed me $10,000. I, I was, I was the big boss then. I was what everybody wanted to be, what they thought they wanted to be. So getting me out of the way, they thought that, um, maybe it was be better for them, but I took care of everybody and I, I fronted everybody. I had about 20 guys that I fronted product too. So I would, I would go down there, I'd pick up six keys, I'd split them up into all different packages. And then I had about 30 of my own customers that bought consistently an ounce, a half ounce, whatever. And I liked them. I socialized with them, hung out with them. They all had girls with them and it was my social life too. And I was, I worked hard at it, drove around all the time, stocks filled with money, pockets full of money, money just falling out everywhere. And that's when I knew that I was screwed. My girlfriend at the time was Cuban, her mother's boyfriend was Mexican and we went to her parents to her mother's house with her husband, boyfriend, whatever he was. He knew about me. I had a street reputation, I was no angel. And we're sitting down and, and I said, you know, Lenna, I have a problem and I told him what happened. He's like, oh, yeah, you have a problem. He looked at me and he smiled and he goes, make it go. That's where you got a go, man. And I'm like, Mexico, he goes, yeah, man, I got to go down there. I got to bring a car to my father. I'll take you. That was the only offer I had. It was the only idea that had come up. I was four days into what had just happened. My partner who was in the car was sitting in jail in Georgia. Poor guy, man. He had never broken the law in his life. Everything was on me. My friend's name was David Bonomo and he was the most stand up stud, five foot tall, 85 pounds on a kidnapping once he got caught for me. They beat him. They put plastic bags over his head because I had a cop that was there. He's little. So they said his feet were shaken in the air when they were putting the plastic bags over his head and so he was now stuck in in Peach County, Georgia. I was back in Chicago. People weren't paying me. I became what, you remember the term in the movie is desparado? That's what you really become. When you are hunted by the law and you don't want to be caught, it's a desperation that starts building inside of you. And so I started robbing more drug dealers. I started kicking indoors and I started collecting money and I finally got in the car and him and I were off to Mexico. So February, three weeks of February. Okay. So hang on. So what are you wanted for at this time? At that time, I didn't, I didn't, I know I had the Fed cases. So I had Fed cases for counterfeiting. I was a suspect in a, in a kidnapping and I had ATF charges for running guns. But the feds are patient. I didn't have any experience with the feds up until then. They had brought me in for fingerprinting, handwriting, exemplary. I had a really high powered lawyer, Michael Monaco. He handled the title in all case in Chicago and he was, it was personal, friendship thing. So he was handling my stuff and he would only call me once in a while and say, Hey, Scott, this isn't going to go away. And I just kept thinking it'll go away like all my other shit as a juvenile went away. But so I had counterfeit charges and counterfeit money because we had been involved with a whole bunch of counterfeit and people that got caught and they testified and grand juries and stuff. But I didn't know. The, you know, the Chicago cops get you hot. The feds do not. They don't care. They're building cases behind the scene and a guy from the TJOs, Mark Troman, he had called me up and told me, Scott, I got caught with some of that counterfeit man they want you. They told me to set you up with anything, even just an ounce. I was like, yeah, fucking keep dreaming. They're not catching me. I was cocky because I had slipped through the cracks for a long time. And nobody knew where I lived. I was invisible almost just just my routes and occasional visits to different spots. I couldn't have been pinned down really. There was like nowhere where anybody knew Scott is always there at this time. So, so I, I don't know what to do. I'm lost and I'm trying to collect money and I'm getting desperate and next thing you know we're in a car and we're driving down the Mexico. I got you and you're me and Leno who was my girlfriend's mother's boyfriend and he's probably 14 years older than me, maybe a little more. Now his whole family is in the business. His brother laws are all Colombians. They're all doing business. He had been, he dabbled in it, but he's more of an artist than anything else and he was Hispanic people are used to difficult lives so it's not like it shocked him. He wasn't judging me. He's just like, yeah, let's go to Mexico, place to run. And I'd seen movies. I started asking people like, I'd been to Cancun in 82, but Cancun was a small fishing village in 1982. It had like five hotels. It was nothing compared to what it is now and and that wasn't really Mexico then. It was an island off of Mexico basically. So I'm trying to get a grasp of what is Mexico and what am I going into. I borrowed from one of my good friends, I borrowed. Remember I come from a crew. So there's a lot of people connected to a lot of people. I could get a lot of things done with a phone call. I could get somebody killed with a beep. I could get a gun with one phone call. I could get a kilo with one phone call. There's a network of fucking criminals that all know each other. We all grew up together so you kind of tied in and you're rep from before matters. They know you're solid. So I get one of my friends gives me this birth certificate in a social security car. That's what I entered Mexico with and I remember we were in La Rado, Texas and I'm looking around and I'm thinking, man, Mexico, it's funny. It was dry. and I'm like, what is this, man? And he's like, we're not in Mexico yet. I'm like, really? And they had an HEB. I've never seen one before. The parking lot has garbage blowing in its dry. It's January, dry, February, beginning of February. And I'm like, no, it's Mexico. He's like, no. Cross the border. Now we're really in Mexico. The government building's old poor bear, the different clothes, different attitude, different everything. Eventually, we get down to Guadalajara and he takes me to his father's ranch up in the mountains and he takes me to a few places. I'm like, wow, Guadalajara is a city. I was expecting tumbleweed, some everybody wearing some brarros and mariachi uniforms. That's what I thought Mexico was. And I was pleasantly surprised and everything was okay. One day I came home from the gym. And I asked his sister. He dumped me off at his sister's house and I said, "Martha, where's Leno?" He said, "He went home." Or he's gone and I'm like, "I hope we're going to leave the back." She said, "No, he's gone. He's went home." I go, "Yeah, but when's he coming back?" She's like, "No, he's gone." I said, "Oh, shit. I have a meltdown." I'm like, "She's like, I got your papers. He gave me your papers. I earned my bank box." I'm like, "Okay. So here I am stuck in Mexico and making phone calls was almost impossible. Very expensive. It's probably $20 a minute back then." And the only way I could make them, one of the only ways they had these phone centers. So you would go there, you'd go to the counter, you'd write down the phone number. They tell you how much it is a minute, then they tell you go in booth three and you'd go in there, pick up the phone and now you're connected to somebody back home, trying to collect money, trying to figure out what's going on and people start forgetting about you. You no longer matter. And the people, I probably had 200 grand on the street in 1987, and nobody wants to pay. Because they're all re-upping with your product because these are people I was running to. And most of them, if I'm running them a quarter key, let's say it was 10 grand, they're spending it. They're making a couple grand, they're living off of that. Everybody's a big shot in the Coke days. Going out and party in, girls laying out lines on the table, buying cars and motorcycles, what all young people do when they make money, they're stupid with it. And I stayed in Mexico, my girl, I finally got my girlfriend to come down. She came down, we were there for about four months and then I met the love of my life. It's, I met this guy, Tino. I came in the Leno sisters house one day and this thick Mexican guy was sitting there and him and I always joked it was love at first sight. He became fast friends immediately and he was 14, 15 years older than me, wise, very wise man. And one day we were riding down the street on bikes and he stops to bike, he goes, yo, yo, my son, stop, stop, get off the bike, he goes, listen to me, you don't have to lie to me anymore. I already like you, man, you don't have to lie about, he goes, come on, man, everything you say is a lie. Yeah, yeah, who's he shoot outs in the street? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Dolorians, Corvettes, da, da, da, da, da, da, he goes, come on, man. And we get out, I go, I'm not lying. He starts laughing and gets on the bike and we, we roll off into the sunset. And him and I became fast friends and he told me, you got to go home, if you want to collect money, you got to go home and he gave me a copy of the book, Wiseguys, do you familiar with the book? It became the movie Goodfathers. So he gave me a copy of that book and he said, read this, I devoured it and he's like, you got to go home when, when you're out like this, because he would go with me. I'd go, come on, let's go to the phone place or this, that, this, ask, call this person for me and he's like, you got to go home. So I snuck back home, I went, I went back to the Dorado border and I crossed walking, made it back to Chicago and now I was like a real desparado. I was, I was, didn't have anywhere to stay, I still had a lot, I had this beautiful loft department. It was like 5,000 square feet, my loft department may be bigger, it's something out of a movie man. And I couldn't go back, I was scared to go back because my buddies locked up, I don't know if he talked, I don't know what was said, I don't know if my apartment was compromised. So I was staying at different people's houses and I would conveniently stay at people's houses that owed me money and I would wait for them to get money and I would just collect and when done with that, I'd move on to the next person. I was jumping around and I just started doing stick-ops and arm robberies and drug dealers. I didn't, I didn't like to rob innocent, hardworking people. Drug dealers are kind of open market. They don't call the police under normal circumstances and they'll make it up. They make big margins so I was running or I was pretty wild and I noticed people were scared to me. They were looking at me cross-eyed, my girlfriend was like, you're going to stay like this forever? Why don't you just turn yourself in and go on with life and know and then I, so I did what I could do with my group of friends and then I started hanging around with that guy, Tino full-time and he was full-time into the business. Tino, his family, his extended family, they were big times so I was involved but not involved so they trusted me because again I had a street reputation, I had Leno that vouched for me and so I was kind of in the mix of pretty, pretty big people, like bigger than what I had been involved in ever before but I wasn't doing anything really with their business and fast forward, I introduced them to one of my cousins and they started doing business with my cousin and all of them are rolling and they said to me in the meeting, what do you want out of this? And I said, I want anything, I said, come on, you're fixing all this up and I said, you really want to know what I want and I said, I want you guys to forget my name when you get caught. They looked at me and said, what do you mean when we get caught? I said, come on, guys, you know, it's not a question of if it's when. When you're in the dope game, you are going to get caught, the feds, they just, they've got a lot of advantages and the bigger you get, the more interested they are in you and especially if there's violence. So fast forward one year my cousin gets arrested, he gets arrested on the news everywhere. He was a former chief of police and several jurisdictions outside of Chicago and he was a Chicago ex-Chicago cop and he got arrested and that led to, to me, you know, his son and his son's friend who were involved led him to me. So my alias I was living on there was popped and my, you've seen those movies where they did do that scene like, it's just like fucking closing in. I mean, I couldn't believe it. My heart stopped because I had created a life. So I had put myself in a better position. I had done a really big job a couple of months before that and I was kind of set. So you were holding up drug dealers that weren't involved with your family. I never did anything to do with anyone. Right. No, I never. So your cousin was a cop. He was moving keys. Yeah. Yeah. And he got 28 year, state time because he, the state wanted him because he was one of their own prior to that. And he was a political figure. He was going to run for mayor in one of these towns. So he was not a street guy. He should have never gotten. I tried to talk him out of it, but the family all blame me, the whole family blame me. I have all the newspaper articles. I've probably got six of them. And he did 13 and a half years in prison and he ended up being cellmates with one of the leaders, Joe Gancy of the TJOs, the guys that I had known. And he didn't snitch on anybody, not one person. And you talk about a stand up guy. I kind of have, I don't have a chip on my shoulder about it, but though that Colombian group and those people, they kind of turn their back on me so fast forward, I know things are going bad. He gets caught then the guy whose papers I was using, he was a handicap kid. So he's a handicap kid from our neighborhood that I knew. And I went over to his house, I'm like, hey, Peter, how you doing? Just talking to him and I go, hey, you don't have a job, man, let me help you get a job. I got someone who might give you a job and I had him fill out a job application. So I got his birth certificate, his social security number. I knew he would never drive. I got a driver's license. I got everything. So I lived under his name for a long time. And then when his name got burned, the fed showed up at his house. I'd give, I don't know how much I'd give to see their faces. He showed up with swat with everything and they to see some little handicap kid. He rolls to the door and he can walk, but he just wasn't right. He was, I don't know what he had, but he died, he died young. He ended up having kidney failure. He had some type of syndrome, but he was a good kid. And so they show up at his house and he didn't fucking snatch. They showed him my picture. He told me when they showed him my picture, he said, I almost shit my pants. He goes, fuck and Scott is using my name. And great kid, he didn't say a word. They said, you know, he said, never saw him before in my life. So it's the people you least expect that hold their mind. And then the guys with the muscle and the tough talk, they're the ones signing the documents and snatching on everyone. And so I took off from Mexico. That was it. I sold my loft building I had, I just, I liquidated it. I didn't sell. And you had cash from the score. I had done a really big score that September before that, a really big one, a jewelry score from a store. A store. Yeah. So he was fencing and I found out he was, the cops were bringing him stuff, thieves were bringing him stuff. I staked him out for about two months and beautiful score. And then you got off the jewelry. And then I became a jeweler. I opened up jewelry stores. I was, I was now a different person. And I had like four, four aliases that I, because I know they would burn out. Look, I grew up in the street. What did you come, we know that, tell us about the, what is you, what do you think you made off that haul? Oh, I couldn't even mention it, but it was retirement money, it was, it was two or three times retirement money. It's all in seven. Yeah. Seven figures. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, but there were a couple guys involved and you know, it had to be split up. But I had already had, you know, I was already okay and, and ran away to Mexico. And, and now it was in Mexico on my own. And it didn't bring me, I went back on my own and that frantino owned a house and he gave me the keys and said, you, you can stay in my house. And I was staying in his house and I was miserable. I had broken up with my, my girlfriend Lisa, the Cuban girl who was absolutely a ten. I had, didn't pay attention to a Belinda who, my other girlfriend, blonde hair, blue eyeed ten. So I was just sitting over there all by myself, couldn't speak the language. You can't meet people and socialize. If you can't speak the language, I mean, and you're, and you're thinking like, I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. And I basically had cut off 99% of the people in my life. They knew nothing about me. So that, that rumor was circulating. And I'm in Mexico and just, I'm going to the boxing gym every day. The arena, Coliseo, the real old school boxing gym. So I'm training boxing. And you're in Guadalajara. I'm in Guadalajara and I start giving kickboxing lessons at another gym where I was lifting weights. So they hired me. I was doing it more to keep myself busy and stay in shape. And one day this, this thing just happened in my life. Tino had been down visiting and he was shopping for properties. And so we met this guy. The guy had been, Mexicans are very good, they're very good, uh, sandbaggers, business people, just hustling. This guy kept coming looking for Tino. Tino had gone back to the US and he, he, he one day I was hiding in the house because he was ringing the doorbell. He's like, Hey, where do I saw you? I got my fuck. I go out there and go, yeah, man, this guy's gone. I don't have anything to do with it. Leave me alone. He's like, so I saw you working out. You like working out, right? I go, yeah, he goes, you want to buy a gym? I own a gym. I like really? Now he got my attention. He's like, I'll sell you my gym. He was desperate for money. He goes, come on. I'll take you there right now. It was about seven in the evening. We jumped in his car and we drove a couple of miles away, a nice, very nice neighborhood. And you could see the building from like four or five blocks away. It was three stories high and the lights were on. So you could see it. It was a residential area but there was life and man, I have this energy like shoot through me. I'm like, wow, this is cool. He parks right there in front. We get out. He's saying hi to people. There's there's men, women and children, pretty girls, dudes, lifting weights, a restaurant, reception, first floor is like a dance studio. It's got the bars on the wall with the mirrors and second floor is the weight room. People are pumping, iron, I'm like, this is fucking cool. And we go up to the, there's another set of stairs and it goes up to the roof and he takes me up there to the roof. As soon as I got on the roof, I said, man, this is my fucking loft apartment, my penthouse. And I immediately thought what I could start doing to this place and then he take, he took me up there to show me he had an adjacent piece of land next door. And he goes, that comes with it if you want to buy him. We were at the Notary's office two days later signing. I bought that place and got to work and the truth is, Johnny, it was, and it was like heaven sent. I had a purpose now, no, no more crime, no more anything, but then guess who I meet. I meet every Mexican cop who you can possibly imagine. All their kids came, I was training professional boxers and I was training kickboxing. I was the only guy probably in Mexico training kickboxing at that time. So all of these, these copo's sons, they're all coming to train with me. I mean, all of them and I met so many of these different guys you couldn't imagine and let me say something on their behalf. They're just, they're, they're man like other men, most of them are very generous. They're very nice, very, very good with people, charismatic, generous. I, I'm not going to drop any names because it, I just don't want to, but one of them, he came to me and it's just like the nicest fucking guy. He gave me these two big deer heads and this guy is on the front pages and stuff and, and just the nicest guys and I would see them at night clubs and everyone go, that's God, kickboxing and struck there and then one day, guy comes up to me and he goes, big, big guy and he goes, I didn't know you know my cousin from Chicago. He tells me the guys and I'm like, yeah, I'm trying to kind of look away and he's like, anything you want, Scott, you tell me, you want a ton, you want two tons there tomorrow? It's yours and I'm like, nah, nah, that's not me anymore and he's like, come on, make some money. And what an experience because I was meeting politicians, I was friends with the governors, the mayors, the police chiefs, the federalies, the common down tastes, everybody. I'm a social guy, met a lot of people and I built a life. I was now a citizen. I woke up every morning thinking about the gym, went to sleep, thinking about the gym and friends of mine would come from the US and I would hook them up with these people. So somebody came down and they go, hey, they want weed. I go, okay, I'll introduce you to this guy. Some guy he wanted Reynolds, remember those pills, roofies, I'll introduce, I'll introduce you to this guy. Then there was Mandrax. There was Mandrax. So introduce someone to the Mandrax guy and I was at a couple of tables with meetings. I avoided. I have a six sense. I don't want to be at a table. So if you and this other guy are talking about a deal and I'm not involved, I'll get up and walk away because I want you in Mexico you get killed. So I'll give an example. If there's five guys sitting at a table and they all know about what's going on and the airplane or the boat or whatever the load gets busted, the boss might kill those four other guys. I don't want to be one of those guys. So I want him to say, one time I was at a meeting I got up and he said, where are you going? And I said, I don't want to know. Why? He said, because if anything goes wrong, I want you to sit down and say, I know Scott had nothing to do with it because he didn't know. But I'll get to a story that's relevant to that. So I'm in my world. I am doing my gym and meeting people and socializing and chasing skirts and having a basically normal life. I'm a huge boxing insider. I'm love being involved in there. I'm in the boxing world in Mexico and you're all this whole time. You're still on the run fugitive. You're a fugitive. What name are you going under at that time? Well, I had, like I said, I had four different names. So the first one, I don't want to say the names because I still have a couple of them put away. But I have full ID. I have full ID. Right. No passport. I didn't want to risk the passport because I didn't know what kind of dangers I might, you know, I didn't know. I didn't know what the feds might have crossing pictures or something. So I almost got a passport, but so I got all different kinds of names and I have good IDs. I mean, I had really, really good IDs. At one point, I walked cemeteries and found people around my age that had passed away young or at birth and I would go and get social security cards. And then I had, I don't know if you know who the outlaws are, a biker game out of Chicago. Well, I had, I had one of their guys. He was, I was close with him through kickboxing and he, they get, sometimes gets some pretty good connection. So they had a person inside of the vital records in Chicago that would produce something for you and give you that birth certificate 100% legit filed everything and he would give you, he had someone in social security. So he would give you a so security card and a birth certificate, 5,000% legit. And so I, I, I was covered there and I went back and forth to U.S. often. I was back and forth all the time. I was spending a lot of time in LA. I got pictures with Mr. T Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was I was in the gym world now. Right. I was going to the shows. I was going to the events. I was mingling. I was a new person. Did you did you change your appearance at all? No, I didn't. I you know, I just I dropped my last name. So Scott and Anthony is my middle name. I dropped my last name because that was burnt out and I never used it again in my life because my conscience. I just I don't want people punching me in and going, Oh, he's a criminal. So I'm I'm I'm living that life and everything is going pretty well. I'm staying as far away from trouble as I can and I like to call myself a street guy in remission because it's still inside of me. I still had offers like, Hey, I got this gym equipment that fell off a truck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bring it over here. I'll give you pennies on the dollar. And I still had a cup. I still dabbled in some extra money, but not too much. And I was really trying to get myself out of it. But when you're in like the scene from the Godfather, he keep pulling me back and people would say, I got this job and I got this guy. And let's do this and couple guys in Mexico had brought me stuff too. And that'll be my sixth book is about a job in Mexico where they brought to me for 30 million dollars. We're planning on it was an airplane that was transporting cash. But that's that's much further into the future. So anyway, I'm down in Mexico. I'm living my life. I'm going back and forth. My mother told me the feds had been coming consistently to her apartment. And one day one of the feds said to her, I'm the quit drinking that dirty water and getting sick and come home and quit chasing him. And he said, there, you know, this thing isn't as bad as it looks. So I had found out I'd spoken to my partner David who was in Georgia when he got caught. I spoke to his lawyer. He got out. I'm bond after about nine months. And I called his lawyer anonymously and I said, let's pretend you were speaking to Scott. What would you tell him? He said, well, if I could speak to Scott, I would tell him if he could stay lost for five years, they're not going to charge David and bring him up alone because he'll beat it. They want them both together. They're pretty sure they're going to catch Scott. You know, the FBI is all over it. And when they got them both, then they'll bring David. If Scott could stay out of harm's way for five years, it's an easy case. David, David, what his case will end. All right. And this is for the keys for the keys to Georgia. Right. Okay. So that's like the main charge that I thought was the main one. I thought that was the biggest and the main. I wasn't even thinking about the feds. They were because I thought that I never got caught with any counterfeit money. I didn't know at that in a sense, stupidity, whatever you guys want to throw on me. I didn't know that all the feds need is someone to say it was him. That's all the feds need. And I had about five people pointing the finger at me for the counterfeit. And the guns, well, they had me dead to write on the guns. But to me, I had already been arrested in Chicago three or four times for you, you, you, you on a lawful use of a weapon. Yeah, you, you, you, weapons charge. I was like, what do I care about weapons charges? But the feds, it's a whole, it's a whole different game with the feds. And so the feds had a couple weapons charges on me and the counterfeit. But I didn't know. I was gone and lost. I thought, I thought the Coke in Georgia was, was what I needed to worry. Right. So eventually I got caught. There were, there were just federalies everywhere. And, uh, you know, they, they, they came first I lied and no, no, no, that's not me. I'm somebody else. I got my ideas. You want to see them? And they showed me my inner pole, uh, wanted poster. And he, he looks at me. He goes, is this you? I looked at the guy and I smiled and I said, it's kind of hard for me to deny it. It's like, you showing me a mirror and we both laughed. The next thing I know, they threw bag over my head like a cloth bag and they handcuffed me behind my back. They throw me in the back of us a bourbon and two fat dudes sit on top of me. And we drive for, you know, 20, 30 minutes and, uh, they pull me out. You like cattle. You treated like cattle in Mexico. And at, at, at that time, there was no sophistication in anything to do with human rights. Yeah. Yeah. Zero. And, and, uh, this is the second time I was locked up in Mexico. I was locked up there before for something stupid. But I was in the federal building for, for about 10 days. So they brought me back to that federal police station and they pulled me out. I don't know where I'm going. They're leading me. I can't see anything. Bring me to an office, uh, pull the bag off of my hat. I'm catching my breath. And, uh, boss comes in. He's telling me takes the handcuffs off him. Take, take my handcuffs off and then he takes a, a, uh, semi-automatic and he, he chambers around and he puts it on the desk in between us and he goes, go for it. Nico. Nico is, uh, the name of Steven Segales movie above the law, you know, martial arts. So I was really in the martial arts. And, and so they had, they had investigated me. And on my FBI forms, it talks about me being a ninja and all that stuff. And I remember one of my karate teachers from Chicago, he, he was Chicago cop and they questioned him a lot. He got scrutinized over me. And he's like, they'd be like, uh, you know, scots like a ninja. And he's like, oh, he's not like an ninja. You know, he's a kickboxer. But I was, I was a, a pretty good martial artist, a, a better kickboxer. And, uh, he goes, go for it. I go, come on, man. What are we doing? He goes, okay, how much are you going to give me to get out of this? And right there, I sat there and it was a come to Jesus moment and I said to myself, where am I going to run? Where now? I'm going to start at, at over. I'm going to start all over at zero. And, and I'm like, you know what? I said, just going to go home and face the music and, and, and that's it. And it threw me in the cell. I don't, so do you think it's you were kind of a public figure in Guadalajara. You were out there. I still am. Yeah. You knew a lot of people. You knew politicians and, and obviously, I don't think that's what got me caught. But clearly they, they found you. And then the Mexican federalis were like, okay, we'll bring him in. They saw it as like an extortion. They probably get paid. The first of all, they probably get paid for getting you. And then the, you know, the FBI tells them this is where the FBI can't work down there. So, so there was this, there was this American lady that came in to take one of my kickboxing classes one day, tall, blonde woman. I felt it immediately. I, I, I thought something was strange about her. She was probably something to do, CIA, DEA from the embassy. So, so I felt it. I just, I don't know why. And she's still in my mind today. She didn't say anything. I just something I said, oh, this is funny. But here's the irony, Johnny. This is, this is God's hand on my shoulder again. They turned me over to Georgia. I was booked into Georgia five years and one day after the date. And I have the newspaper articles. So I was pulled over on January 18, 1987. And I was booked in January 19, 1992, five years and one day. So why is that five years significant? Because that's the status they couldn't charge my companion anymore. He couldn't be charged without him. I can point the finger at him. I can say, I didn't even know those were his bags. If they have us both together, they thought I was dead. My, my lawyer told me, he said, we, we thought you were dead. That you were shot when you were running. And then my lawyer said, Hey, boy, you hear them? Can you hear the bullets whistling by? You can hear them. You can hear them. You can sometimes feel if they're that close. So I, I'm booked into Georgia. I brought out a Mexico five years and one day, but I didn't know. I wasn't conscious of, I wasn't date checking. I really only knew now when I'm writing my books and people are helping me find newspaper articles. I go, damn, that's why I got out of it. I got out of it. So I, I got out of the case in Georgia and they didn't even charge you. They charge me. And I sat there for a year and two months. But they, they were probably fumbling. And the feds wanted to pick up the case, but then the feds realized it was pre-guidelines. So that's why they were probably holding me for the feds. And I thought I was getting out. They said, Scott, pack your shit. Let's go pack to all my stuff. You know, you're waiting at the door, door opens. It was about four in the morning. I, I go out with my boxes stuff and I gave everything away. You know, everything out in my food, my TV. I, hey, you can have this, this, this, and this. Goodbye. I'm out of here. And I would have gone back to crime. Maybe, maybe, I don't know. And I got out. I'm, I'm in shipping and receiving. And they're, they're processing man. I, I don't care if I get out in my underwear. When I was young, when you got out of prison in Illinois, you got a suit and a hundred dollars. And now I don't think they give anybody anything, but a cyanara. And, and so I, I look over at the, there's, they're buzzing through the, the, the doors. And I look and there's these two tall guys. And I'm like, fuck is this? And, you know, they came for me. So the feds are there waiting for me. You got, you know, we're, we're picking him up and they, they pick me up. And then I went through, it's, it's miserable going through the fed, the fed tour. So, so I, they take you to a bunch of little county jails, dropping you off and transferring you. And then I, I was in Atlanta, federal prison for about three months. What an ugly place that is. And then I was in El Reno, Oklahoma for about two months, the old at El Reno, not the new one with the jet weight. This is the real old Reno and then Chicago MCC for about six months, and then I got out on bond. Okay. So is it, they've got you on the gun running and the counterfeit and the counterfeit money. Okay. And I probably could have beat them, but you learn a lot in the Fed system. You learn a lot. Everybody tells you, in the state, you can beat stuff. I know there's some stubborn guys out there and they all talk tough. The best thing you can get in Fed is a good deal. It's a good deal. Right. And I didn't even hire a lawyer. I knew better. I knew the system. I said, you're throwing your money away. I got a public defender and he's, you know, I was out on bond. I got out on bond. I was probably out on bond for a year and going back and forth and back and forth. And then he said, they're offering you eight, eight years of probation and I was a young street thug. I took so many plea deals. I said, fuck, yeah, care. You don't care. All that effort, all that money, all just just to give you a plea deal, just to give you probation. But what are there? There's all pre guideline cases. Right. Right. Well, there were no big deal gun charges back then. They started that felon with a firearm after 87, the counterfeit. It's possession of counterfeit and they just got a fucking bunch of junky witnesses. It was, I'm telling you, I, in my, my third and fourth book that I haven't published yet, I write about every day of my life. When you're a street criminal, every day of your life, you are breaking a law that you could get 10 to life for. Every, every fucking day of my life. You're, you're laundering money. When, when I was young, that you didn't have any of these money laundering charges either. No one went after the money. But you're, you're moving money around. You're moving dope. You're robbing drug dealers. You're using guns. There's, there's a lot of violence. But when you're a drug dealer, it's not like a person who robs bank, a person who robs a bank. He's vulnerable for what, 16 minutes while he's robbing the bank and getting away. When you're a drug dealer, it's 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They're bugging your phone. They're bugging your page or they're, they're, they're searching your house. They're following you. They're bugging your car. They're, they're on your ass. And if it's the feds, they're building a case. And then they're catching other people and they're flipping those people. So you are always under the loop. I was very, very careful. I was very good at what I did. And that's why I didn't get a case. I remember when, when Tino and I first met, he, he, he didn't believe my bullshit. He, he, he, you know, I never heard of you. Well, that's because you hear about the guys who get caught. Those are the ones you hear about. Everybody you've interviewed has been in prison. That's where they became known. And unfortunately, a lot of them are known for being snitches. And I was never going to tell my stories, Johnny. I'm embarrassed. But now I'm 62 years old. I said to myself, what does it matter now? I'm not going to hide it from my kids. My house, I'll tell you something. I have a young wife. I have a young, beautiful wife. I have four small children. When I met, because I'm not a typical, I, I started this relationship with her. She was 19 years old and I was 46. And I said to her, I got to tell you something before we make any move forward. I used to be a gangster in a criminal. She laughed. She said, you don't look like a gangster. She's, she's Ukrainian. And I said, no, I just want you to know I have a very ugly past and I don't handle situations like most people. And she was okay with it because people in other countries are, they're used to people being less than perfect. In the US, we got a lot of perfect lifestyles. People, I mean, we use, so, so now, or from appearances, yeah, from appearances, I guess, yeah. From the US for 40 years, so I don't know a lot about the US anymore. It's a different world to me. So okay. So you signed for eight years, thinking, whatever, I'm just going to go back to the streets. Now, let me make you, let's go backwards. When I was in Georgia, and this is a very important part, I'm glad you reminded me. So when I'm in Georgia, and as soon as I get locked up and I'm there, the Colombian send me a lawyer. I call my mother and she's like, oh, it's so nice. Don't go. You'll call. And he wants to know if you're okay, if there's anything you need and he's getting you a lawyer. I said, okay. And she's like, always been asking a lot about you and I, what do you think he's asking about? He wants to make sure they're not getting involved. And they were just, I was helping them with some logistics and they were moving stuff from Colombia through all of South Central and Mexico to Guadalajara. And there was a guy there that I hooked him up with. It had a carpenter shop and he was unpacking and repacking for the border and this whole thing. They're worried about themselves. They're not worried about me. So I said, he's not taking a call. You know, they're from the outside through my mom, okay. The lawyer's coming. I waited for three weeks or a month for the lawyer for the lawyer to come. I was offended. I was offended. I'm just a piece of fucking meat here. No lawyer, no lawyer. Every day I would ask. Every day. And one day the major came in and he's like, oh, Scott, you big fancy lawyer here. He's got a nice car and I go, yeah, he's here and he said, yeah. And I go, he goes, he's wearing a nice suit too. Got a big black Mercedes. And I said, oh, he's a big shot. He goes, oh, yeah, where's he from? And I said, Atlanta, he's big shot lawyer and then he said to me, we ain't in Atlanta. Oh, nice sat there and that was a nice fucking comment by him because it made me think. Ding the bell went off. I'm going, we're not in Atlanta, are we? Atlanta's like 100 miles away. So I go out there and I meet him. He's in the office. Beautiful suit. Red tie. And I'm talking to him. And he's like this. He's listening to my story. He goes, listen, Scott, I got a plan. You know, I need $60,000 and there was a guy that I had a case similar to yours. I got him 10 years, he did 10 years in Georgia. They had a really funny thing. It was like 60 years, do eight, 80 years, do 10. I didn't like that. I didn't like that sound. The 80 sounds like you fuck up and you're, you're doing 80. And I didn't like that. It was real uncomfortable. He's like, yeah, I think it goes, but I'm having a problem, you know, they really hate you here. They hate you. He said, it's been almost a month since I requested your paperwork, he goes, they haven't given me anything. I'll keep, I'll keep, get on him. I'll get it. He goes, I got an idea. So you were living clean when you were in Mexico, right? And your mother told me your friends with the governor's son, I go, yeah, he goes, I'm going to go down there. I'm going to film. We're going to talk to all the people. We're going to build this case on the redemption and the person you are now. And I'm sitting there thinking, it doesn't sound like a real good case. But whatever. He's not talking. He's not paying attention to me. And I said, you know, why did it take so long for you to get down and he goes, I'm waiting for the paperwork. He goes, but today we came down and he goes, I got to go to, because there's this really good restaurant, my wife likes, and that's why we came, we'll grab a meal there and I'm not feeling the vibe. You know, it's not feeling like he gives a fuck about me. And as you know about lawyers, they don't give a fuck about you. So with my tail between my legs and my soul and little ding, I'm walking back to the station so they can take me to the cell blocks. And the major is taking me and he goes, how's everything with your big shot lawyer? And I go, I don't know, I don't feel too comfortable about him. And he goes, I'll tell you what, he's no big shot here. Oh fuck, I go back to the cell block and I get my legal pad because that's all you could buy at the commissary was a yellow legal pad. And I go around and I start asking people, hey, what's your lawyer's name? This guy. There's three lawyers they kept coming up with, so I had three columns. One of them had one person, the other one had like two or three and then Mr. Garwood had like everybody in the jail. He was a public defender, but also private. And so once I had that, I'm looking at him, thinking this guy might be my guy. And so I started asking the guards, I go, you don't Mr. Garwood? Oh, yeah, I know, everyone knows Mr. Garwood and I asked the major, he's a big, big black guy like a bear. And I said, Major Brown, I said, do you know Mr. Garwood? He goes, hell, yeah, everybody knows Mr. Garwood. And I said, is he a good lawyer? He said, well, he's like this with the judge and the prosecutor. That was it. That's all I needed to hear. I got on the phone. I called my mom. I said, mom, you got to find this attorney out of here, Mr. Garwood. Once, once I'm focused, that's it, I'm ADD, like a dog with, with dowsinger, with, you know, what's he called autism? I'm just focused. I'm calling my mom every 30 seconds. Did you get him? You get him? She's like, I got him. He won't talk to me. He's because I tried to call him, but he wouldn't, he wouldn't accept a collect call. She called to me. He said, he's already got a lawyer because I called to me. He said, you got a lawyer. I said, yeah, I have a lawyer. Sorry, I can't talk to you. And he hung up. And you got to get rid of a lawyer. Then I'll talk to you. And he hung up. My mom called me. Said, look, ma'am, he needs to send a letter to the court to everybody to the lawyer saying he's relieved of his duties. So some jailhouse lawyer there. helped me prepare a lawyer. I sent it out to everybody, CC'd everybody, and drove this fucking man crazy until one day, Major Brown came, he goes, someone you've been, wait, I asked about him every day. I asked every day, he goes, Mr. Garwood's here to see you. I'm like, oh, fuck, I swear to you again. I'm a very fortunate person. That's why I'm grateful for everything I have and everything I don't have. They're walking me through, and we get to a room. Now, he doesn't go to a room like everybody else. He's like in the sheriff's office or something. This is, he's part of that community. So I'm in a free zone where I probably could have ran away, and he's just in an office, and when I walked in and looked at his face, he was the absolutely spitting image of my paternal grandmother. White, white, white, blue eyes, blood vessels red in the nose like he liked to drink, white, white hair. Just the nicest man I came in, he goes, how you doing, Scott? And we just start talking. Just two guys talking, and I said, Mr. Garwood, the prosecutor and the judge, they hate me. How old, Scott, they don't hate you? Shit, we was talking about you yesterday. Damn, we surprised you alive. You know, they didn't turn your papers into the feds for quite a while. They were sure we were gonna come up with a body. Did you get hit when they were shooting at you? And I go, I thought I did, but he said, 'cause you fell and you did double backflip. And he said, "Damn, you were wild, man. You, they said you ran away." That, that trooper that got you, that was Johnny Hitchcock. He had lightning bolts along his patrol car for all the drug smugglers he would get. You know, the Colombians had a price on his head. We had to transfer him to somewhere else. He was gonna kill him. He's like, the prosecutor's name was Biff Tillis. And he said, "You know, me and Biff was talking about you yesterday. Nobody here hates you." I said, "But the other lawyer that they sent me, I said, he said they hate him, he ain't from here." He goes, "Nobody here hates you." I said, "They wouldn't give him the paperwork." He said, "You don't worry about the paperwork. Do you let me worry about the paperwork?" And I said, "How much are you gonna charge me? I need to know." He goes, "How the hell can I tell you how much I'm gonna charge you? I ain't even looked at your case yet." Now, you just sit here and you relax and you let me get to work, okay? You're gonna be okay. I said, "I don't know, I'm gonna be okay." I got some pretty heavy charges. He said, "You let me worry about it." And I said, "Okay." And then we started talking. He told me a story about Senator Sam Nunn from, from Georgia, who was a personal friend of his. And he said, "You know, we had a friend of ours from over here. His boy got caught down in Columbia, smuggling some weed. The DEA had pictures of him on the wing. And he was loading them up and he goes, they put him in jail in Columbia. He was locked up down there. He goes, "Senator Sam Nunn, he called me because he was friends with the old boy's father. They gave me a suitcase with $70,000. And I took a flight to Columbia. I went and got somebody that Sam Nunn had recommended at the embassy down there. And we went to the jail. He said, "You know what? I brought that boy home with me." Wow. Oh man. Give me a minute. He said to me, "Scott, I think you just a boy having some fun. You just like adrenaline, don't you? A lot of young men do that stuff. You're going to be okay." Now that's that room. And I made a promise to myself, no more a crime. This guy believes in me. He doesn't know I'm a piece of shit. He thinks I'm just a young guy. Having some fun and being wild. And there's a partial truth to that, right? 'Cause there's some redemption in me. And I left there and I made a promise. I said, "I'm done." And I started calling people at home and I started saying, "Don't include me in anything." And I had, you know, it was a moment. I had a moment. And then the Colombian found out that I fired their lawyer. And so I had to talk to one of them on the phone. And they were accusing me, one of their drug loads got busted in the Panhandle of Florida coming out of Miami like in Jacksonville. Some were over there and they were blaming me. Scott's locked up in Georgia must be him. I really, really got violent. I had really violent thoughts. And I said, "These motherfuckers." I said, "I never robbed them. I never fucking crossed them. My fucking cousin is doing 28 fucking years." And he didn't say a fucking word. I knew everything about them the whole five years I was around them and nobody ever had a fucking buster or anything and because I'm locked up, that's an insult to a fucking criminal. I'm telling you, it's a fucking insult. And so the guy I'm talking to on the phone, you know, I'm getting aggressive and I'm motherfucking them and I'm, and okay, okay, slow down. So fast forward, they had this thing happen and I get out, you know, a year and a half, two years later and right away they want to meet him. I was an out for a day when they're calling my mom's house and we gotta get together and they, we go to some bar restaurant and we're sitting there talking and they're questioning. - You're back in Chicago, right? - I'm back in Chicago. I'm out on bond and we're talking. I'm like, "You motherfuckers." I said, "How about looking inside of your crew?" I don't know what car you're driving. I don't know what they're leaving. I don't know what's going on 'cause they had money drop and product drop 'cause it would run both ways. And I was pretty upset with them and that's right there when I said, "There's no fucking, there's no honor in this game." What about family and how close we are in the brotherhood? Where's my fucking monthly check? Where's my social security? Everyone is out there, everyone on their own. Everyone wants to make money and put it away and it's a fucking, it's just a doggy dog world and I had promised Mr. Garwood, I didn't tell him. I never said anything to him but it was like a fucking angel. The moment I saw him, he would come all the time and visit me all the time. He would come just to talk and say, "Scott, we're gonna work this out." One thing that bothered me that he said to me, it went into the core. He said, "Look, Scott, you're gonna get out of this. You're gonna go on to build a new life. You're gonna make new friends." Oh man, when he said that it was like a shot to the stomach. These are the people I grew up with for my whole life but then when I got out, you know, let's pretend we were like this before. I had separated myself from that. I had done business. I had had my gym. I had been living pretty much clean and they had all been stuck in the street and they were still, you know, a lot of street people, gangsters, kind of low class, you know, it's just thugs. Man, they're thugs and I could kind of see the difference. It wasn't that I wasn't a thug anymore. I would still beat someone up at the drop of a hat and if you wronged me, I'd probably come for your ass but I could see the difference and see the changes and there's, you know, it was a life that I enjoyed a lot of most of it, but I had outgrown it and I had said that that's enough and I was working and hustling. My friends were still doing the same thing and-- - So you signed for eight years' probation? - I signed for eight years' probation. - With the feds. - Yeah, and I had a probation officer and he was a good guy and he had a have to go in and do my drop test and he was a modern guy and I solicited the court. I had a fake, I had a girl who owned a company and she had distribution around the world. So I, you know, this is an old mafia trick. I had a payroll with her and that was supposed to be my job and so she requested travel and hired a lawyer and I got blank and travel. So I was able to travel the world and I could go to Mexico because of my job. So I go to Mexico, run my, run my business. I started managing boxers, so I-- - So you still had your gym? - I still had my gym and I started training work. I had many, many world class boxers. So I trained Maria Sabacha Martinez, Jorge Baca, Marco Antonio Barreira. I've been the boxing hall of fame three times. I've been there five times, but with three different fighters, I went for Marco Antonio Barreira's induction. I went with Eric Morales for his induction and I went with the late great English champion, Ricky Hatton. So I was with Ricky Hatton for his induction and last year I went for triple G's induction. I wasn't with triple G, but we were invited to the boxing hall of fame, so we just went in June. And so I started training boxers and managing them, traveling around the world, taking care of boxers, and I was schlepping. boxing gloves, so I was bringing them back and forth to Chicago, and on one of those trips. And I'll tell you, it's a bite to the ego. All my friends are rolling. Every guy that I'd ever, not all of them, but most of them, 90% of them were still in the business. But along with Coke comes everything. It comes guns, it counterfeit money, anything, because you're dealing with the underworld. So there's stolen opportunities for stolen products. It's all meshed together. It's all the same fucking thing. And so I'm schlepping these two stupid big bags with boxing. I would bring Mexican boxing gear over the US and sell it. And I come to my friend Brett's house and he is eccentric. He's my friend since we were kids. The guy did the first drug robbery with and he's rolling. I go to his house and I'm sitting in the front room and he's in the back doing who knows what. And I see the newspaper on the table and I pick it up. So I picked the newspaper up off the table. It's wrapped up. It's thick and it's heavy. Same time, he comes out of the room and he's wearing a Versace robe and his bare chest and his expensive braided gold chain. He looks like a fucking drug dealer or a pimp. And he goes, "Ooh, I wouldn't touch that if I were you." And I look at him, he goes, "Ooh, our tour was just here. Our tour was a guy set him up with a few years before that. A big drug dealer." And I throw it on the table and I pick it back up and I put my sleeves down and I wipe it off. And for that moment, Johnny, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, "Fuck, what if the door gets kicked in?" I'm going to fucking jail for eight fucking years because I'm there. And he's going to deny it's his. I'm going to deny it's mine. And I'm fucking wiping that thing off. And then I sit there and he looks at my suitcase and he starts laughing. He goes, "You know, drug dealers are pretty arrogant. When you're making money, you're feeling big. It just makes you taller. You were probably seven feet tall when you were dealing." And he said, "How much you make with that stuff?" I said, "I don't know. You know, a couple grand. I pay my ticket. I make a little bit of money." He goes, "I make that in a minute. I go, I know you do, but you're fucking selling coke." And then we start talking about stuff and I gave him a box of Cuban cigars because I had gone to Cuba on a trip. I bought him street cigars. Now, in Cuba, there's two types of cigars. There's factory verified from the factories and then there's every other Cuban person that has access to cigars and those are considered street cigars. Some could be stolen from the factory. They're street cigars. It's a flip of the coin if they're good or bad. And my trip to Cuba, these two guys came to my room to pick up a bag that I brought him and they asked me, "You want to buy some cigars?" Out of pity, I bought them. I bought them out of pity because I felt sorry for them. They were dressed like 1970s. And I said, "How much do they cost?" I don't remember. I'm like, "In my head, I'm thinking, fuck am I going to do with cigars?" My uncle Joe smoked them, but he's gone. I felt bad. I said, "Yeah, yeah, give me two boxes." They came back the next day. They brought me a box of cooe-best blendidos and one box of money crystal number fours. I paid them when we were leaving Cuba. I threw them on the table and my buddy said, "What do you do it?" I said, "How the maid can have them?" He goes, "Fuck, you paid for it. You paid for something. You take it." Okay, I put them in my bag, back home, get to my office, throw them in a cabinet. Don't think about them. He asks for one. I bring him one. Give it to him. He calls me about a week later and he says, "Hey, you have any more of those?" I said, "You smoked them already?" And he goes, "No, sold them." He sold them for how much? And how many cigars are in a box? 25. And so it's 625 bucks. So I'm thinking, I paid 20, 625. Caching. The light bulb went off and he's got the kilo on the table. I'm nervous because I'm in a house with a kilo and who knows what else? And I said, "You think I could sell those if I brought them here?" He said, "Oh, yeah, for sure." Then he told me a story about a guy in Chicago who drove around on a scooter with a backpack. He had like a minimum of three or four cigars. You would beep him, call you back. You go, "Okay, I need eight cigars and he'd show up in 25 bucks a cigar." And he told me the guy's name. I didn't really know who he was. And I said, "Hey, if I brought some, if I could get some here, how would I sell them?" He said, Howard Frum. Howard Frum was the Rolex king of Chicago. He had this jewelry store that was like a circus. Everybody who was anybody in Chicago went through Howard's store. He sold used Rolex's high-end watches and he was a character. He said, "I said, you think Howard will let me sell them?" Then he goes, "Of course, God. He likes you." And I bought my first Rolex from Howard in 1982. So I knew Howard before everybody but Howard was small. I met him and become friends and he was a character. I had this saying, "If you don't know Howard, you're not from Chicago." And I said, "Okay, that was it, man. I went to my probation officer. I got rid of my boxing equipment and bang. I was back in Mexico. Before I even got to Mexico, I was making calls. Who knows anything about Cuban cigars, who can find them? Took me about a week, 10 days, networking, calling people. Someone called me back and they said, "Hey, Scott, I know of this Cuban guy who sells cigars here." That was it. I called him. He showed up at my office to suitcase as he had a helper with him, his valet, said him out. I'm looking at him. I went and bought at a sand borne in Mexico. I went and bought a cigar-aficionado magazine with Fidel Castro on the cover. So I bought that and that's all I know. I'm reading, looking at pictures. He shows up. He's got all these different boxes, maybe 50 different types. I didn't know anything. So I said, "Remember the movie Blow?" He's like coming to that. So he said, I said, "I don't know. I had five grand to my name." That's all I had, liquid money. When I got caught, when the Federalies came and got me, they stole everything I had. They stole all the jewels I had, all the stones, all my money, everything. So I got five grand in cash and I bought 40 boxes from him from $110 a box. I spent $4400 on cigars. Brand sizes, just $44, give me whatever. And that was on. Let's say that was a Thursday Saturday morning. I had two friends. We were in a car and we were headed to the Laredo border. Okay. So what is the legality around Cuban cigars and bringing them into the US? Okay. First of all, Cuban. Anything from Cuba is embargoed by the US. It is illegal. And then there's tobacco. All tobacco is taxed. You can go to any country around the world except Cuba. And you can bring back, I think, up to 50 cigars through customs. But Cuban cigars are illegal. It is trading with the enemy. It is the trading with the enemy act. You tell me, I have about seven felony convictions. I'm on eight years federal paper. I get caught with 40 boxes of Cuban cigars by customs. What do you think is going to happen to me? Is that a parole violation? Fucking right it is. You are going in and you're doing eight fucking years. And before I decided to do it, I had a talk with whoever is up there watching over me. And I said, please, Mr. Garwood, forgive me. I thought, I thought about him. I thought about my lawyer. And I said, I had made a promise no more crime. And I had stuck by it. I hadn't broken any laws at all. And I said, he would forgive me for cigars. It's only a cigar. Forget about the stupidity that I would have gotten myself in trouble. I knew what I was risking. My whole life had been nothing but risk. And I said, you know, Mr. Garwood had passed away by then. So I had my moment with him. And I said, let's fucking go. And we went to the border, a couple checkpoints, a lot of difficulty, very difficult finding the coyotes to cross it. It's a long story. And that's in my book. So you actually had coyotes smuggling it like across the real ground. Yes, Johnny. I did that for four or five years. I have, I got a newspaper article that I'll send you. I got two newspaper articles. My load got caught in no gollus, Arizona. And there were five four thousand nine hundred and thirty four cigars, you know, the feds like to add instead of saying it's three hundred boxes. They say it's four thousand nine hundred and thirty four cigars. Okay. So explain that. So you had runners where they put it in a backpack. So here you go. How the stars line up for people is amazing. So before I started doing the cigars, I was doing the boxing. Then I, what happened is my compadre, he's my compadre, I baptized his son Mario Savacho Martinez, Fahulio Cesar Chavez for the vacant WBC title that macho, Kamacho vacated in 1984, big hero in Mexico, big box. I managed him. I trained him. Well, these, uh, these drug dealers from the border town, they wanted to be involved with him. So they bought his contract and they became his sponsors. So he, he, he moved to McAllen, Texas to be sponsored and these guys to promote him. And so I had first brought my cigars to Laredo and I brought them across Laredo and that was really sloppy and messy and I fucking hated it. And then a compadre, another compadre of Mario's who was a drug dealer, he goes, "God, I got all the people in Encino Loa and Culiacan and in Nogales, which is Sonora." He said, "I got all the context there. If we pass things every day, we'll go pass them there." So I said, "Great." So I went there and I passed them with the drug guys in Nogales for a few times until he got busted. I didn't like Nogales and I was seen everywhere. I don't know if you know much about the borders but in the old days, the borders were filled with dealers from around the country waiting for their marching dice to get passed or buying selling. So people were approaching me, "Oh, I got this, I got that. I saw you with Oscar, Oscar's, you know, small time. I can do this for you." And I would tell him, "No, no, no, I'm not doing." I go, "Oscar told us," he was lying. He was telling people, "This is my customer because he was trying to get back in the mix because he had dropped out." Now he was wanting to get back. So he pretended like I got a Gringo customer whose big time front me, take care of me. That's how that's how the Mexican on their world works. So I don't know if a lot of people know. I think I believe that I know more about cartels than 90% of DEA agents in Latin America. And the cartel thing is kind of bullshit. There's so many independent guys that there are probably 1,000 guys that are maybe as big as Chapel. They're just not infamous. So there's guys everywhere doing everything and they're bringing my stuff across and- - But how about just in cars like they were smuggling? - No, no, no, no, no, smuggling. No, backpacks. All of my stuff was backpacks. Boreros, they call them. - You mean Boreros? - Well, either one works. But yeah, like the way that they would strap up marijuana on a backpack. And some of my trips, they brought marijuana or they brought Coke. So they'd, you know, one, the night my stuff got busted, there were minimum 20 guys with backpacks, minimum. And these guys are fucking hardcore solid. While the agents were trying to get them, the agents would like take the backpacks. These guys would dump and put them in a pile. These guys would run back and grab them and run. So they only lost half of my load. I, you know, my first trip was 40 boxes. My second trip was 100 boxes or 110. I'm not the kind of guy. I'm not the one who's like, yeah, I'm making a couple hundred bucks a month. No, I'm fucking all in. 600 boxes of cigars, let's do the math. About a hundred thousand dollars. That's what I would sell it for. Right. Yeah. Okay. And are you selling a wholesale? Or I'm selling everything. So think about this. I'm going to Michael Jordan's house. And I would get Michael the best of the best. Now, now, so when I first started, I was getting all street cigars in Cuba. But when you get good at it and I got good at it, I got an education. So that guy talked about on the scooter. I met him. He eventually became my customer. His name was Mark Farrell. And I believe it was a real estate agent in Chicago and he went to Cuba for the girls. He would bring back cigars and he became renowned. Everyone in Chicago knew him for the cigars. But I'm not, I'm not, you know, small time. This guy was bringing 20 boxes. I was bringing the thousand. So I met him, started selling to him. And the first time I went to him, this guy gave me an education I couldn't have bought. He started cracking open my boxes, putting a toothpick in the end. Pulling he's like, shit, shit. This one's good. And he looked at me go, Scott, you got to learn how to fucking pick cigars. You don't know. And I go, fuck no. I don't know anything about cigars because the street cigars, that people are rolling them in their house. The back will might not be cured long enough. They might not have the correct leave. So they're tighter than they're supposed to be. But I eventually, I remember Cubans telling me, Scott, you know more people in Cuba than I do. And I was fucking born and lived here for 40 years. I knew everybody. Everybody, everywhere, I spread the money around. I gave tips. I brought people gifts. I was polite and courteous to everybody and spread the money around. So I had a lot of rollers in the factories that would steal for me. So they would, they would get to cigars out. I had people in the stores. And then the expensive cigars, like the Kuibas, they were too expensive in the store. In my day, a box of Kuibas blenditos was $595, I think. And robustos were $4.50 in Cuba, but that's what I was selling them for in the U.S. So I had this guy, Rubio, that would get me the best. He just had the connects. So I bought all my Kuibas from him and you, you want to talk about something amazing. I met this woman. She had a diplomatic passport. Her husband was an ambassador for one of the African countries. And she would bring my bags out because you can't search. You can't search anybody who has a diplomatic passport. We were in the airport in Cancun. She used to bring more than I did. So this lady was serious. She was a wholesaler. She was fucking all business, bang, bang. She'd come and stay at my house and she was for a roshist business person. You know what the Africans are like? She was from Guyana and French Guyana. She spoke French, dude. She spoke French English and Spanish. And we were in the airport in Cancun. We had about 20 extra large suitcases and some customs agent Mexican wouldn't let us through and said, I'm searching these bags. She said, you're not touching anything. We made a pile of her bags on the floor and she laid on it and made the biggest scene. You could possibly imagine and said, call my embassy now. The boss from the aduanas, the Mexican custom showed up and, you know, they're all going over running and gossiping to him and it's like this fucking big scene in the airport. He comes walking up and this woman flashes that fucking diplomatic passport and he looked at that person and dreamed of a new ass and said, I'm sorry, please get your stuff and leave. And then gave that person an education. So the route was Cuba to Mexico. Cuba to Mexico. You brought them up. I would go. I would sometimes go cancun, sometimes cancun was my route 40 minute flight from Havana or Mexico City is about a two, two and a half hour flight, Mexico City and I had to have customs agents. Any. I met her at the tail end of my career before that I had customs agents that were helping me. I had a side. Yes. No, no, no, no, no. I had one deal here. It was a kickboxer and he worked at customs, but I didn't like it because he let me through Chicago one time, but his other buddies, the customs agents are trained to come and question your companions. So did you ever notice how they, they come like if one guy says I already searched the car, they keep searching. They are checking on their partners. They train them not to trust anybody. So hang on. So is it illegal to bring Cubans into Mexico? No. So then why, why was she making a big scene? You can't bring 20 boxes of cigars. You need tax, import permits, and taxes, and there's a lot of restrictions that will kill your margins. It would kill everything and you can't get anything done in Mexico, legal. You got to have an import permit would probably take four years to get, it just, it wasn't for us. I wasn't the only guy doing this. There were, there was a lawyer in Chicago, his name was Mickey Connors. That's his nickname Mickey Richard, Richard Connors, he was a lawyer. He did two years federal time, I think. He got caught smuggling 25 boxes of cigars for the Canadian border. They took away his law license and he went to prison. There was a case in Northern California, you can find them online, there was a big case in New York. People went to prison for Cuban cigars, so you're doing this while you're still on paper. I'm doing it while on paper. So you know you're risking, I know I'm risking it all, but I had, I was a man on a mission. I wanted to build a big gym and so I, I did that. I didn't spend one penny. All the mistakes I had made in my youth in my early years, not making those again. I was sleeping on the floor, staying in $20 hotels, eating cheap. Every penny I made went back into my business. I was going to make a dignified business and for the first time in my life, I cut everything before it was too late. So my building was almost finished. I built a 40,000 square foot building and it was almost finished. So throughout the years, I had bought the properties, piece by piece. I got this one, then I got the next neighbor, then I got the other one. So I eventually had about 12,000 square foot piece of land all bought at different periods and built at different periods and it eventually became 45,000 square foot health club. I just kept doing it. And when the construction was almost done and I was at my biggest, I had so many customers, I flipped these things so fast and I was now known, known well. And I had, I was legitimate because I would bring people videos. I had bought a camcorder because people scrutinized. There were so many fake cigars, I made, I got videos with factory tours, I'm in the stores with the managers and I've pictures with the directors in my book, Smoke. I have the cards. So can I show you the cards? cover my book. Yeah. I have this is this is smoke and and this is your copy by the way and and I hope you read it Johnny and you'll go what the fuck. I didn't know I had an amazing life so I'm looking for the pictures so that's that's that's my first trip to cube from from Cuba to Laredo that's don't that's my first box that my suitcase of cigars. I have I'll go right to the most important one that everybody cares about. That's me and Michael Jordan's house in his kitchen barefoot that's in Jersey. He gave me and signed. Oh my god. Richard Dent signed this jersey. These are real jerseys. How did you mean Jordan through Michael through Richard Dent? Richard Dent was Hall of Famer. He was a Chicago bear. Sean Gale Sean Gale and here's here's me me and Richard Dent Sean Gale. There is the famous photographer from Chicago Mark Howzer big cigar smoker and so Mark Howzer introduced me to Sean Gale Sean Gale introduced me to Richard Dent Richard Dent introduced me to Michael Jordan. So you're over. Dude, this criminal from the fucking. Tell me about it. There are the newspaper articles when they captured my cigars in Nogales. Okay, so when it's Spanish English, it's so wild like you're taking pictures with your customers like this is not not it's socializing. It was complete. It's not a illegal business, but it is it is, but it isn't, you know, but it's a ATF tell that to the ATF and prosecutor. But we got Jordan is like yeah, I got a little legal cigar. I got something for you. I had a federal judge who was a customer, a federal judge. Here you go. But you think he would have answered my call if I got caught? No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Think he would have called the other judge and say, hey, hey, Scott's a good kid. Let him go. I mean, it just shows you how ridiculous the law is. Well, any embargo is, it's just so retarded. But if it didn't exist, I wouldn't have been able to do it. Of course. If if that didn't exist, I was the one willing to take the risk and here's the funny thing. My book went out on Goodreads. Goodreads is this website where people, it's like a book club. My book went out on there and I read the, I read the comments and one lady, I'd look, big fat lady, her picture's on there and she says, look, it's a really good book, but I think he's bragging. And then of course, I'm bragging. It was an amazing period of time and I pulled off a fucking caper that most people couldn't have pulled off. And then another guy said, yeah, the book is really good, but I really doubt it. It sounds like this guy's seen too many movies. Try it. I want to see you. Anybody out there? Go to Cuba. Anywhere you want. Pick up 50 boxes of cigars and get them back to Chicago. You tell me it's easy. This was not easy. This was the same as drug trafficking, but what I was going to tell you where I was fortunate, Mario Asabacho Martinez had gone and lived in in in McCallan, Renosa. He was in both of those places and and and what what the what happened is I called him and I said, Hey, I've been going with your compadre Oscar to no gollus and it's a fucking shit show. You know anybody over there and he said, let me ask. So he asked this guy and this guy hooked them up with his mules. So so I took took the trip to to Renosa and he introduced me to Romero who was a professional smuggler and that was the plug that changed everything for me. I never lost a load. Wow. Never had a problem. This kid never screwed me. He would. I mean, we had some bumps in the road. There's always going to be problems when you're involved in the underworld, but this this kid was amazing. 10, 20 guys through the river, through the fields. They knew where the sensors with my back. I bought military green backpacks and I would pack them in boxes. I finally figured out it was so much. It was dangerous for me to drive them because I had all the federally checkpoints and they want money. I took the bus a few times. It's it was even worse because you've got all the cops in the bus stations and you've got the the hawks that are seeing and reporting who's doing what. That was hard. I started sending them. I started shipping them from Guadalajara to the border. Never had a problem. So I would just show up at the border and I'd bring my bags with me because I'm not going to you can't carry those backpacks. They just look too suspicious. One time we had the federally is the the federal Houthisialis. They kicked in the door at our hotel because one of the guys that was we were we were. My couldn't find my guy. So we were looking for a new guy to cross them and he went to the feds and turned us in and they came in and the bags were all gone because I'd found my other guy and he came to pick them up and I still had to pay him off. The common Dante said to me goes, look, it's this fucking simple. I was at a party. I was having fun. I am not leaving here with nothing. You're paying me or you guys are all going to jail. But having Mariela Sabache, the famous boxer, it meant it helped me. You couldn't imagine how much it helped me. That the cops were asking him for pictures and autographs because he fought Julio Cesar Chavez and he was still active. He was still fighting at that time. So you would ship them like DHL from Guadalajara to the border? I think I shipped them on the buses through the the buses like the Greyhounds. They got so many different bus companies in Mexico. Buses are very nice and luxurious in Mexico. So and then you get them to your smuggler in Reno. I get them to Reno so to heat to the bus station. His brother would go and pick them up, storm at his brother's house and then they wouldn't do anything with him until I got there and packed them into the backpacks and arranged everything with them and they'd bring them right to my hotel. What's what's a typical load? How many cigars? 500 boxes. 500 boxes. So I mean sometimes six, seven, but the average was about the average was between 300 and 500. Depending what my risks were, how expensive is like if I had special ordered cigars like Michael Jordan, I would get them these special handmade cigars. They were very expensive. So I don't want to lose a load, you know, so it was kind of based on money. If my load was 30 grand in my cost, that's it. So it could be 300 boxes or it could be 600 depending what cigars I had. And how much did you have to pay him to cross? It was so cheap. You know, I think about it. When I first started bringing him from Cuba, my first trip to Cuba, there was a charter flight so we could fly from Havana to Guadalajara and I had the boss of the federalities there. I paid him 125 dollars per suitcase. It was, I mean, it was just like a tip. Right. But everything was cheap. My boxes were 10, 15, 20 bucks. I would bring 70. I'd bring 35 boxes in each suitcase. I'd have two suitcases. I'd give the guy 250 bucks. So if you're moving 600 boxes, by the time it gets to you in Chicago, a lot of expenses. How much is each box at the final price? At least double whatever I paid for him. There's a lot of expenses because you have hotels and people traveling with me and but a hundred bucks. No, 50, 60 bucks. And you're flipping them for 500. So it changed Johnny when I started buying only factory. So I did the streets cigars for about a year and a half and I got good ones. No one ever really caught on. They would question the stamps because the stamps have dates. So they the fucking street people don't have a variety of stamps to make it perfect. Some of them did, but most of them didn't. So about a year and a half, I did the streets cigars and then I got busted with my ex-wife. We both got busted there. I had more than a thousand boxes stored at a guy's house and I had to get out of there. So I came back for a court date and I brought a bunch of guys with me. We got about, got about half of my, I probably got 800 bucks of those cigars out and then all of us one day got busted, but I didn't, I didn't get caught because they registered. I used to pay people's trips and then they would register my stuff and they got there late. So Mexicans are not like Germans. It's not like you're dealing with the Japanese. So I told them you got to be there at noon. We got to be there three hours before the flight. My customs guy told me three hours before it. Don't fucking waste any time. They got there 20 minutes before the flight. I was already through customs and I hear my, my friends say, "Yabalio Madre Cabron!" And I said, "Oh, fuck." And the other guy with me said, "Let's get the fuck out of here." I go, "No, we got to go back." They start pulling the suitcases out and we see him piling up and person from the airline came over and said, "Scott, you got to get out of here. They want you. You're not going to help them get out of here." They, they have a better time if you're not here. So we went to the bus and my compadre came and he goes, "Hey man, what are we going to do?" I said, "They told me I got to get the fuck out of here." He said, "Yeah, they were asking about you." He said, "Give me the fuck to rest." The receipts. So I gave him to him and then another guy came and he was about to cry and the one guy who was with me said, "Don't leave me alone." And the other guy with me said, "Fuck, I'll go with him too." So, but what's the, how much trouble you get in in Mexico for? Thank you, but this was Cuba. Oh, Cuba. it's funny. Americans think they can get out of anything. I know the rules. I know the laws. That you got fucking zero human rights in Cuba zero. Okay. Okay. But the factory cigars. How did that change? Now, so what happened is when I got caught with my ex-wife, we got taken in the airport, our passport seized and they didn't let us leave for about a week. My customs guy told me I'm going to fix it. Scott, you're going to have a court date. You're going to have to come back to the court day because in Cuba, this is in Cuba. So I came back for the court when so long story short, when when me and my wife finally got our passports back and escorted to the airport and fucking thrown out. When I went through, they brought us there like five hours before the flight. So I had an eternity to sit there in the waiting room. And there was this American guy from San Francisco laughing, having fun. He was drunk. He was joking. I go, what are you so fucking happy about? Remember, I just had 400 boxes taken away. And he's like, because I'm going home and I got my cigars and I go, you got cigars and he goes, yeah, I go, how'd you get them through? He goes, what do you mean? How did I get them through? Fucking registered him. I go, how many? God, he's like 25 boxes. I go, they didn't call your bag back or anything. And he's like, no, because they always call them back. If you had too many cigars, let's see your invoices. And I said, where'd you get them? And he said, what do you mean? Where'd I get them? The factory. I go, you get them at the factory. I said, I've been trying to get them there. They never have any. He goes, who do you know there? I go, I don't know anybody. He goes, oh, that's the problem. He goes, I know the director. He goes, you call Ernesto Lopez and you tell him that Larry sent you and he'll get you anything you want. You know, it just registered to get back there. We exchanged numbers. We actually became friends and I burned him later. I burned. Okay, so did you, did you go start buying from the factory? So what happened is I went back the next month to my court date. They denied me everything, but they didn't arrest me and didn't lock me up. And I had four or five guys there pulling my cigars out. They had already done it. So my, my court date was a month. I said, I'm going to let it cool down. So I didn't go back and forth, but I sent two guys there, two different times and they got my suitcases out. And the third time I went there for my court date, then the guy showed up and they were leaving with my suitcases. I couldn't leave with any because I had just gone to court and I was under, under watch. So that's when they all got caught and they, they told me they, when they got out of jail, they were in jail for a week in Cuba. Then they got deported from Cuba and they were told, you tell that guy, Scott, if he comes back here, we're putting him in jail. So I called my customs guy and he checked it out. He said, Scott, you are expelled for a year. Do not come back for a year. So I started sending other people now. They couldn't go and choose streets of cars like I did. I was very experienced by now. So I called Ernesto and I said, Hey, Ernesto, this is who I am. I'm a friend of this guy's and he said, yeah, I said, I'm sending somebody there and he sent them in and Ernesto introduced the person I sent to two different people from two different stores to be able to buy because they, they were very scarce in Cuba. The, the, the majority of their inventory went to foreign countries. It went to their legitimate distributors around the world. Not tourists are going there to buy. They, they left them the scraps in the stores. So, so you would go in a store and there was nothing desirable. You had to spread the tips around and people would each store would like save 12 boxes for me. And then I figured it out. I figured out I probably had 20 different stores. I went to, brought them VCRs and, and different things they asked for from the other world. I started bringing clothes. So I would buy fake bootleg clothes in Mexico and bring it to Cuba and, and, and trade it for cigars. They'd go crazy over the stuff I'd bring. So how much, how long were you doing this for? I did it for about four, four to five years. And did you finally get off? Were you on probation the whole time? No, I was on paper the whole time. Wow. Yeah. And so what ended up happening is my, how much do you think you made? I couldn't say that, but a lot. And, and like, how much were you, how many runs were you doing a month? I put it this way. I'd gone to Cuba 60 times. And at about four, four hundred to six hundred boxes of a rod. No, because in the beginning, it was 70 boxes and it was 150. Then I got greedy and it was 600. And then when I got the custom sky showed up with 14 fucking suitcases, full of cigars. And he's like, fuck no, Scott. You know, one guy alone can't do this. You can't do this again. And I just kept getting better and needing people. And then once I was doing the factory cigars, everything changed. I had no more problems. You know, Cuba's got high intense good security. They knew what I was doing every step of the way. So when I started buying only factory cigars, they knew they said, okay, this guy's good. So, but then you still have to smuggle them. Well, you have a limit. No, you have a limit out of 25, right? No, no, the limit out of Cuba is a thousand dollars. No, I meant bringing them into the US. In the Mexico, it's 50. And so I had to pay, I had to pay to get them out of Cuba. I had to pay to get them into Mexico. I had to pay to get them through Mexico. I had to pay to get them through the border. And then once they were in Chicago, they were mine. And I had to sell it. It was a job. It was not easy. Everybody thought I was just Scott from Mexico. I never told anybody my, my, my other names. I was just Scott from Mexico. I was a cigar guy. And I didn't want, I didn't want anybody to know I was baking big money. One time this Jewish guy, Mark Richmond, he's a sports agent. Very, very sharp guy. We're sitting in his office just like we are right now, smoking cigars. He was very good to me. My customers were all very good to me. Look at me. He goes, wait a minute. Scott, let me figure this out. So you're bringing 300 boxes times this. And you, you're making more money than I am. I'm like, no, Mark, I'm barely making it. He's just looking at me like this. Jews are smart. And he just figured it out. He did, he did the numbers better than I could have done it. And I was involved in it. And I just kind of played stupid. And we went on to the next subject. I co-existed with all of my cigar customers. I would sit in their office and smoke cigars with them. I'd go out to dinners with them. I'd go to concerts, boxing events. It was a really cool period of my life. And 25 dollars was what you were selling them for? 25 dollars. No, no, no, I'm selling them for five. Oh, I didn't sell single cigars ever. Oh, okay. I sold them by the box. I had people, I had people that bought 30 grand in a sitting. I had a billionaire. He was a billionaire. He owned a really, really big trucking company. And he sold it to general electric for a billion dollars. Wow. Just coming, just dropping tens of thousands of 30,000 dollars at one, one city. I had, I had cigar lounges. I had nightclub owners. I had yellow taxi or checkered, which have yellow yellow, yellow cab from Chicago, the owner bought cigars. I had the biggest jewelers, the big and nobody ever got robbed. Nobody ever got kidnapped. I never committed a crime again, except, I mean, I beat up a few people, few people didn't pay me. I had the rough up people, man, people out there in the world, they're opportunists. You know, they don't know. I remember one, there's one guy, he, he, they're cigar mooches, just like there is drug mooches, like a mooch, you know, I, hey, Scott, you know, I want to make some money off this too. You know, so I left him cigars and he tried not paying me. And I went to Howard from the Rolex dealer because he was a friend of his and he had introduced me to him. And I said, Howard, this guy didn't, he, he's not answering my phone calls and he's not paying me. And he called him, called him on the phone. He goes, listen, motherfucker, do you know who Scott is? He goes, this guy's the real fucking deal. He said, you know, he was a professional kickboxer. He will beat your fucking ass and hang you out of the window. And then they argued. If you've ever seen Jews do business, you know, they fight and argue with each other and they start swearing at each other and he hangs up and Howard says to him, God, I sold him his Rolex. They'll take it from him. I'll pay you, I'll pay you for it. And then I'll work it out with him. So I went and got Wacker and I went and got this other guy and we went over his house and knocked on his door. I did this in the drug business more times than I can say. I was going to say you've probably got some nostalgia from doing more more times than I can count. So, so we, we show up at his house and Wacker is six foot four. He's got jailhouse tattoos and he's wearing a wife beater and he's kind of got a belly and he looks like a thug and he was and so I knock on the door and he, it's a house, but it's two apartments. So his wife comes to the door and I go, I'm looking for your husband and she goes, yeah, I'll be here in a little while. Come on in. She lets us in. The three of us go in. We're sitting there and we're just waiting. You should have seen the look on his face when he came into his living room. We were sitting there. I go, how you doing? I go, you know what I'm here for? And he started getting cocky and I said, don't get cocky with me because I will give you a fucking beating. Then he got even cockier and I slapped him in the face and we, it turned into a scene and we, we hung him out of the window. We, we right there because the fight started at his door. He got cocky at his door. He ended up getting pushed to his, the, the, the sill and the stairs were here and there was a window there and it was low and we hung him out of the window. His, his wife came running with the Rolex because I kept saying, give me the Rolex. His wife gave me the Rolex. She said, get the fuck out of my house. Here's the fucking Rolex blah, blah, blah. blah, blah, blah. She calmed everything down and we left and I went to Howard Frums and he goes, what the fuck did you do, Scott? You hung the guy out of the fucking window. I said Howard, you told me, I didn't think you would do it. It's a good impression of a Jew. Yeah. He gave, he, I didn't think you would do it. I gave him the watch and he paid me. He paid me and that was it. Never heard from the guy again. So, and could you do this hustle today in this day and age? Like, is there, are there the same restrictions around Cuban cigars? Well, there's a Cuban cigar boom right now. It's huge. It's just a cigar boom in general. Yeah. And yes, I could sell them again. The problem is they're really, really expensive now. And I don't know if there is the underground market in Cuba, like there used to be. I know that one of somebody read my book. We became friends. He sent me messages. He has a girlfriend in Cuba and he's doing what I used to do in the old days. He has someone at a factory and they sell them cigars for a dollar a piece. So he's getting whatever he wants. This guy is a roller in the factory. He can steal. He can buy and this guy's buying them from him. Yeah, you could do it. I bet you're there's people doing it. I would say there's people doing it. But most of the ones you're finding in the US, the Cubans, they're actually fake Cubans. They're made in the US and boxed in the US. They're not coming from Cuba. Did you ever think about repackaging the cigars and making them look like Dominican cigars, Nicaraguan cigars. You know how much work that is. Yeah, 600 boxes. Oh, man, it's fucking miserable. It's miss. Well, I'll tell you another funny thing. I've met Henry Hill in Havana. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that was kind of funny. Henry Hill, the real Henry Hill. Not really Otis character and good fellows for. And the funny thing is Arnold. I'm trying to think of all the celebrities that went to the part of his factory. Antonio Banderos and his wife, you know, I knew his wife. Here's a funny thing for you. I was good friends with Steven Bauer, Manny from Scarface. So in the 80s and I was good friends with Steven. He filmed the movie in Chicago and I hung out with him the whole time on the set. Everything, what a stud, man, the lady. He's cool as fuck too. He's just a really good dude. Yeah, Steven's just a really good dude. And I went out to California and hung out with him a few times. And then we lost track of each other. I was talking to someone recent. I might try and reconnect with him because Steven is a really good dude. And he's he's all over my third book because how many people can say that they were a blow dealer. And I was probably one of the largest coke dealers in Chicago at that time. And I'm hanging out with the crew from Scarface. Not many people have their claim. My life had a lot of facets. It was a very, very unique life. And here's the thing, Johnny. I never really knew it because it was mine, right? Okay. So you're sending all this money, all your profits you're making, you're sending back to Guadalajara to build your health center. My new life. What does that mean? Like is it like a gym? It's a gym. It's a health club. So so 45,000 square foot gym. I put in a like an eight story climbing wall, racquetball courts, half a basketball. I put in a on the rooftop. I built a fast soccer court and a full basketball court. They they combined a huge boxing area, aerobics, spinning huge weight room, cardio area, restaurant, everything. And that's there to this day. It's there to this day. Well, what ended up happening is so I told you I learned from my past mistakes. Don't be greedy. Learn when to just cut and run away. I one day I said the engineer who was helping me build said Scott, you know, we're almost I know we were almost done. So we're almost done. We were about to tear the walls out and join the buildings together. And I needed equipment bad. So I went I went to the US to do my last it was my last cigar run, but I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell any of my customers. I didn't tell anybody. I sold all of my cigars and collected more than normal. So I didn't leave a lot out there on credit. Got all my money. When I was done on that cigar run, I had let's call it 50 grand cash in my pocket and I flew out to California to this guy that I had known met years before that sold used equipment. And I bought my I bought $45,000 something like that worth of gym equipment. And I had enough money to pay for the semis. I went to Arizona to load the equipment. It was a gym. It was an LA fitness that was going out of business. So I bought the club loaded up the equipment. I drove I loaded myself. I drove with the driver to the radio, did all the importing stuff got my equipment down there, put it in my gym, turned off my beeper, put my I had at that time I had a business card. Remember they used to have these folders and you had business cards. I put it in a drawer and I said I'm done. I never answered anybody, but I had left 30 boxes and cigars at my mother's apartment in Chicago. So my next trip, I went back. I took those to one of my customers and still owed me money. I gave him those on credit and once he paid me, I never spoke to him again. And here's the funny thing. I saw Michael Jordan in a nightclub restaurant a few years later and then I go over and talk to him. I said he doesn't give a fuck about me. This is the truth and you have to be honest. I wasn't I was his buddy. When I was a service provider, Michael could get anything he wants anywhere. When I stopped selling, you think he didn't find them? You should have said goodbye though. I know because you know why? Because of greed because they would have said one more. Yeah. Bring me this. And the thought had gone through my mind. I said, you know what? I can just do wholesale now. I won't sell them anymore. I'll just I'll actually send them. Yeah. I'll send them to each of my different guys and this is the bill. This is what you owe me. But that's a conspiracy. That's a case that can come back on you. My gym was done. That was my whole purpose. That was my end goal. And here's what happened after that. So I opened that gym and I turned it into a golds gym. So it was a golds gym. I I became friends with all the top guys at the golds gym franchise. I later parlayed that and I bought the rights to golds gym and I became the master franchise for golds gym in Mexico. I franchise 34 gyms. Six of those I owned myself. And then I started a fitness equipment company. I started importing supplements, all the nutritional products. I was bringing in all of the golds gym souvenirs. And I created this really really big business at my peak. I had over 300 employees. And one day, Johnny, we had a Christmas party. Mexico parties are a big deal. We had a Posada. It's a Christmas party. So I'm there. We rented an entire restaurant. The entire restaurant is rented. I probably have six or 700 people there because all of the employees are allowed to bring their significant other and their kids. Kids are a big deal in Mexico. We had all the blow up dolls and the mechanical bulls. And I was sitting at the head table and I sat there and I could see the entire restaurant. I sat there for a minute and I remembered something my mother told me when I was young. She told me about my great grandfather sitting at the table because he had 11 kids and from those 11 kids were spawned a lot of grandchildren. And my great grandfather said, look at what I created. And I sat there that moment into myself. I said, look what I created. I did all of this from that street kid in Chicago who had no hope. I didn't think I was going to do anything but go to prison for my whole life and I accepted it from an early age. And somehow with a force greater than myself, I gradually made the steps in human involvement to the point where here I am, I am the boss of over 300 people. I was the largest fitness equipment company in Mexico at one time. I probably still am. I still have a company now. I have products produced in China. I have my own brand. I have three companies with different brands and I still have my 45, my original 45,000 square foot gym. So in the end it's a story of redemption. I'm the father of eight children. None of them have ever seen the inside of a jail cell. And then I had this, this is my fifth book is my divorce. That's why I said that other $30 million airline job is number six. My fifth book is my divorce. I had the worst infamous divorce ever in the history of Mexico. A gringo getting divorced in Mexico. Boy did I take a beating a beating like you couldn't imagine. Some people might say, well, that's karma. That's what you deserve for all the things you did to people. And I probably wouldn't disagree with them. But that book is going to be the best book ever because you talk, you want to get in a jam. Jam yourself up in a third world. Figure out what it's like being involved in the courts in a third world as a foreigner. So she took you to the cleaners. She didn't only take me to the cleaner. She hooked up with a politician, a sitting politician, and a very, very powerful wealthy man. And she lied to him from the beginning through the end. She spun a tail that I was the evil shrek. And and she was the princess. And she tells people to this day, and that book, you wanna talk about a real story. - So I don't wanna cut you off from telling your divorce story. - No, the divorce story is another thing. I don't even like to talk about it. - Yeah, 'cause that sounds like a nightmare. Don't marry a Mexican, folks. Street raised was a book that was never supposed to happen, 'cause those were my gang days, the orphanage days. I was in an orphanage for two years, and in all the juvenile homes and street gang, and I was the president of my branch of the street gang, and I ran with some pretty infamous characters. I knew all the prison crews and all the people. - So this is the new one. Where can people go to just Amazon? - And I'll send you the link. - Great, the link will be in the description. - My social media, Scott Anthony OG. I'm on all social media. That book is bestseller since day three. The same as Smoke, Smoke was bestseller. That is a bestselling book. It is rockin', it's still on the bestseller list a week after its release, and I've been told it's a really good, good read. - It's amazing, man. This is really, I mean, just-- - And I got something, I gotta tell you, and I have to apologize. I had asked you if you smoked cigars. I was planning on bringing you cigars. - I was gonna ask you that. And I went to the duty free in Guadalajara, Mexico, leaving, and they have no Cuban cigars. Cuba's being squeezed. They have none. And I walked all over the airport looking, and I said, you know, it bothered me. I thought we would smoke a cigar. You're a cigar fish, am I though? - Not a fish in auto, but I like smoke. - Me too. It's a really cool, relaxing, and it's like a bonding thing for guys. - I love it. Well, maybe we'll go over if you're in town. Well, there's a cigar shop here in downtown Austin. - Yeah, we gotta do it for a couple of nights. We'll go have a cigar, and we'll talk more, but Scott, what a pleasure, man. - Really? I hunted you down. You remember the first guy you introduced us? - No. - Sammy Horowitz. - Oh, right. Okay, Chicago guy. - Chicago, he was a street gang, and he was a boxer too. Sammy and I have these parallel lives, and then did, I don't know if Tommy G sent you a message. - No, but I know Tommy's a buddy of mine. - Me too. And Tommy said, he said, you gotta be, he said, you gotta be on Johnny Mitchell's show. He goes, Scott, your story is amazing, 'cause Tommy knows some guys, I know, Tommy's doing a documentary currently with Stevie Bullets, which is a guy that can vouch for me, and he goes, man, you gotta be on Johnny's. I go, I've been after Johnny for months, but he's too busy. - I'm glad you hit me up, though. - I'm gonna send him a message. - All right. - Yeah. - All right, man, well, I'm glad. - Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm glad we hooked up, man, and it's inspiring. - I'm no longer the person I used to be. I wanna make that clear. I am redeemed, and I've spent years covering the bad deeds with good ones, so I've helped a lot of people. I've done a lot of good things, and I sleep well at night. So, there is a happy ending to some of these street stories, not too many, and people can criticize me. But Johnny, next episode, man, I got stories never ending. - Awesome, man, you're welcome back anytime. Scott Anthony, go start off with his first book and run through all four. You know, he's got two more coming. Go see him if you're in Guadalara. You guys, we'll see you next week. Take care, thanks for watching. Peace out. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)